Sardou's Cleopatra — page 62: what you’re looking at

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

SARDOUS CLEOPATRA. A? former strength. Putting his arms beneath the unconscious man’s shoulders, he raised him from the ground, and, assisted by Iras, bore him away to a narrow, vaulted cell beneath the floor of the temple. In the room was a pallet, on which he deposited his burden. ‘He will be safe here for the present,” he said. “Remain with him until I return with a potion that is needed to give him back his strength and complete his cure.” Iras, alone with the man she had been instru- mental in snatching from the very jaws of death, sank down beside him, and taking one of his hands in hers, raised it to her fresh young lips. She loved him, and without the shadow of hope; for he, whose eyes had looked upon the incompar- able beauty of that royal Circe, who captured hearts only to cast them away dry and withered, would never learn to care for the modest sweetness of her Grecian handmaiden. What mattered that, however, at this moment? Hewas saved, and the bosom of the gentle girl swelled with infinite thankfulness. “S an Gomicboo (E(@)