Tormenting herself with these thoughts, the unfortunate woman passed a sleepless night, and rose determined to know the worst. As soon as Ariston had gone out, she entered his workroom. Her search brought her at last to the brazier, where she found the charred fragments of the letters from Halicarnassus. Unluckily one corner of Artemisia's missive to Clearchus had not been wholly burned. She bore it in triumph to her own apartments and set herself to the task of deciphering its contents. The very fact that her husband had sought to burn the letter was enough in her excited frame of mind to convince her that her suspicions were correct. It remained only to establish the proof.
She succeeded in making out a few words, but she could derive no meaning from them. Study them as she would, her skill failed her. The tantalizing thought that knowledge was within her grasp and eluding her filled her with rage. She was still puzzling over the fragment when she was interrupted by a knocking at the door. On the threshold stood the sharp-faced Egyptian whom she had so often seen with her husband.
"Is Ariston here?" he demanded.
She told him that her husband was away from home.
"Then I will wait for him," Mena returned coolly, pushing past her into the house. "He told me to see him without fail and he will soon be here."
There was no help for it now that he was inside the house. Xanthe led him to a bench beside the cistern and gave him fruit and wine. The thought occurred to her that he might be able to read the riddle that had baffled her. There could be no harm in showing him the fragment, she reasoned, since it could tell him nothing, although to her it could reveal so much. The temptation was strong, and after all the opportunity was too good to be lost.
"Can you read this for me?" she asked, placing the blackened papyrus before him.
He took it up and studied it curiously.
"Where did you find it?" he demanded, shifting his beadlike eyes quickly to hers.
"The wind blew it into the court, here," she stammered, taken aback by the question. "I wondered what it might be."