“I will hear,” answered she, almost faintly, and there was no colour in her cheek. But as she spoke a voice sounded from the hall below, and the young man shrank behind his tamarisk.
“Gracious princess, condescend to honour your slaves by coming down to the luncheon, which is ready.”
Atossa sprang to the stairway.
“Have I not bidden you magpies keep silence? Do I not know when I hunger? Begone, or—”
Retreating footsteps told that the menials had not waited for her threat. She turned to the stranger, and faced him fairly.
“Sir,” she said directly, “I will believe you are Darius’s friend. Say on.”
Now what Isaiah told of the adventure of Darius with the king in the Hanging Gardens we will not here repeat. When he had finished, when Atossa knew the height and the depth of the Babylonians’ guile, the Jew looked for a scene of terrible agony. He did not know the royal strength of the daughter of Cyrus. Her white cheeks grew yet whiter, but her only answer was, “Yet though I know all this, what profit? Am I not prisoner here? I shall see Darius again, at a time only Ahura the Merciful knoweth. By your own mouth the prince is safe and free.”
“He is free, but not safe.”
“Not safe? Belshazzar will put forth his hands against the sacred person of an envoy? I cannot believe this guile,—I will not!” Atossa flushed as in the anger of despair. “The king may swear a thousand oaths, as you say, and keep none; but to murder an ambassador were a deed which Marduk and Ramman, his own foul gods, would reward with swift vengeance!”