So said Glaucus.  But that very night, in a house at Pompeii, whither she had come from Naples during his absence, Glaucus came face to face once more with the beautiful lone, the object of his dreams.  And no longer was he able to say, “I do not love.”

II.—­Arbaces, the Egyptian

Amongst the wealthy dwellers in Pompeii was one who lived apart, and was at once an object of suspicion and fear.  The riches of this man, who was known as Arbaces, the Egyptian, enabled him to gratify to the utmost the passions which governed him—­the passion of sensual indulgence and the blind force which impelled him to seek relief from physical satiety in the pursuit of that occult knowledge which he regarded as the heritage of his race.

In Naples, Arbaces had known the parents of Ione and her brother Apaecides, and it was under his guardianship that they had come to Pompeii.  The confidence which, before their death, their parents had reposed in the Egyptian was in turn fully given to him by lone and her brother.  For Apaecides the Egyptian felt nothing but contempt; the youth was to him but an instrument that might be used by him in bending lone to his will.  But the mind of Ione, no less than the beauty of her form, appealed to Arbaces.  With her by his side, his willing slave, he saw no limit to the heights his ambition might soar to.  He sought primarily to impress her with his store of unfamiliar knowledge.  She, in turn, admired him for his learning, and felt grateful to him for his guardianship.  Apaecides, docile and mild, with a soul peculiarly alive to religious fervour, Arbaces placed amongst the priests of Isis, and under the special care of a creature of his own, named Calenus.  It pleased his purpose best, where Ione was concerned, to leave her awhile surrounded by the vain youth of Pompeii, so that he might gain by comparison.

It fell not within Arbaces’ plans to show himself too often to his ward.  Consequently it was some time before he became aware of the warmth of the friendship that was growing up between Ione and the handsome Greek.  He knew not of their evening excursions on the placid sea, of their nightly meetings at Ione’s dwelling, till these had become regular happenings in their daily lives.  But one day he surprised them together, and his eyes were suddenly opened.  No sooner had the Greek departed than the Egyptian sought to poison Ione’s mind against him by exaggerating his love of pleasure and by unscrupulously describing him as making light of Ione’s love.

Following up the advantage he gained by this appeal to her pride, Arbaces reminded Ione that she had never seen the interior of his home.  It might, he said, amuse her.  “Devote then,” he went on, “to the austere friend of your youth one of these bright summer evenings, and let me boast that my gloomy mansion has been honoured with the presence of the admired Ione.”

Unconscious of the pollutions of the mansion, of the danger that awaited her, Ione readily assented to the proposal.  But there was one who, by accident, had become aware of the nature of the spells cast by Arbaces upon his visitors, and who was to be the humble means of saving lone from his toils.  This was the blind flower-girl Nydia.