"You are so beautiful and so different from them all that he will certainly talk long with you after the banquet this evening--when he has drunk much wine." The last words were added with a most special sweetness of tone.
Nehushta's face flushed a little as she drank more sherbet before she answered.

Then, letting her soft dark eyes rest, as though in admiration, upon the queen's face, she spoke in a tone of gentle deprecation: _"Shall a man prefer the darkness of night to the glories of risen day?
Or shall a man turn from the lilies to pluck the lowly flower of the field ?"_ "You know our poets, too ?" exclaimed Atossa, pleased with the graceful tone of the compliment, but still looking at Nehushta with curious eyes.
There was a self-possession about the Hebrew princess that she did not like; it was as though some one had suddenly taken a quality of her own and made it theirs and displayed it before her eyes.

There was indeed this difference, that while Atossa's calm and undisturbed manner was generally real, Nehushta's was assumed, and she herself felt that, at any moment, it might desert her at her utmost need.
"So you know our poets ?" repeated the queen, and this time she laughed lightly.

"Indeed I fear the king will talk to you more than ever, for he loves poetry, I daresay Zoroaster, too, has repeated many verses to you in the winter evenings at Ecbatana.

He used to know endless poetry when he was a boy." This time Nehushta looked at the queen, and wondered how she, who could not be more than two or three and twenty years old, although now married to her third husband, could speak of having known Zoroaster as a boy, seeing that he was past thirty years of age.