Then she said eagerly:
"Let not thy jealousy trouble thee concerning Seti--he is naught to
me--I love him not--a boy, no more."
"Seti!" he exclaimed contemptuously. "I have no feeling against Seti
save for his unfealty to the little child who loves him,--whose heart
thou hast most deliberately broken."
"Not so," she declared vehemently. "I can not help the boy's
attachment to me. She is a child, as thou hast said, and is easily
comforted. Not so with maturer hearts like mine."
She put her arms about his neck, and flinging her head back, gazed at
him with a heavy eye.
"O, wilt thou put me aside for Masanath? What is her little dark
beauty compared to mine? How can she, who is not even a stately
subject, be a stately queen? Wilt thou set the crown upon her unregal
head, invest her with the royal robes, and yield thy homage to a scowl
and a bitter word? And me, in whom there is no drop of unroyal blood,
in whom there is all the passion of the southlands and all the fidelity
of the north, thou wilt humiliate. The gods made me for thee--schooled
me for thy needs and shifted the nation's history so that thou shouldst
have need of me. Look upon me, Rameses. Why wilt thou thrust me
aside?"
She was not dealing with Seti, or Siptah, or any other whom she had
bewitched.
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