Sardou's Cleopatra — page 227: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

212 ; SARDOU’S CLEOPATRA, double row of colonnades connecting with the Temple of Horus. It was high noon; and at a window in an upper story of the palace, overlooking the gar- den, stood the queen, arrayed in her most regal robes, with a diadem of jeweled serpents upon her head. ‘To-day in the temple was to take place a most solemn service, an invocation to the gods to ward off the danger that threatened Egypt and its queen from Octavius and his ad- -vancing hosts. - ’The queen was very pale, and her lovely feat- ures wore an expression of grief and pain, which was but in small measure due to the reported approach of the hostile Roman legions. Last night she had lowered her pride and sent Char- mian to beg an interview from Antony, only to be refused with scorn and contempt. Could she but see Antony, she felt confident that her pow- ers of fascination would win him back again, but to seek him in the midst of his soldiers, who she knew were filled with the bitterest hostility to herself, she did not dare. Although, in her flight from Actium, she had done him the foulest wrong, she loved him more passionately than ever, and she longed with a wild longing for the return of comicbooks:-co =