I hate him! and yet--wild as it sounds--I believe I love him yet.

And he loved me--for two years; then he went to the war with Seti, and remained a long time away, and when I saw him again he had courted the daughter of some rich and noble house.

I was handsome enough still, but he never looked at me at the banquets.

I came across him at least twenty times, but he avoided me as if I were tainted with leprosy, and I began to fret, and fell ill of a fever.

The doctors said it was all over with me, so I sent him a letter in which there was nothing but these words: 'Beki is dying, and would like to see Assa once more,' and in the papyrus I put his first present--a plain ring.