But Thais was frightened and troubled; she avoided Lollius, and yet he was continually in her mind.  She suffered, and she did not know the cause of her complaint.  She wondered why she had thus changed, and why she was melancholy.  She recoiled from all her lovers; they were hateful to her.  She loathed the light of day, and lay on her bed all day, sobbing, and with her head buried in the pillows.  Lollius contrived to gain admittance, and came many times, but neither his pleadings nor his execrations had any effect on the obdurate girl.  In his presence, she was as timid as a virgin, and would say nothing but—­

“I will not!  I will not!”

But at the end of a fortnight she gave in, for she knew that she loved him; she went to his house and lived with him.  They were supremely happy.  They passed their days shut up together, gazing into each other’s eyes, and babbling a childish jargon.  In the evening, they walked on the lonely banks of the Orontes, and lost themselves in the laurel woods.  Sometimes they rose at dawn, to go and gather hyacinths on the slopes of Sulpicus.  They drank from the same cup, and he would take a grape from between her lips with his mouth.

Moeroe came to Lollius, and cried and shrieked that Thais should be restored to her.

“She is my daughter,” she said, “my daughter, who has been torn from me.  My perfumed flower—­my own bowels—!”

Lollius gave her a large sum of money, and sent her away.  But, as she came back to demand some more gold staters, the young man had her put in prison, and the magistrates having discovered that she was guilty of many crimes, she was condemned to death, and thrown to the wild beasts.

Thais loved Lollius with all the passion of her mind, and the bewilderment of innocence.  She told him, and told him truly from the bottom of her heart—­

“I have never loved any one but you.”

Lollius replied—­

“You are not like any other woman.”

The spell lasted six months, but it broke at last.  Thais suddenly felt that her heart was empty and lonely.  Lollius no longer seemed the same to her.  She thought—­

“What can have thus changed me in an instant?  How is it that he is now like any other man, and no longer like himself?”

She left him, not without a secret desire to find Lollius again in another, as she no longer found him in himself.  She thought it would be less dull to live with someone she had never loved, than with one she had ceased to love.  She appeared, in the company of rich debauchees, at those sacred feasts at which naked virgins danced in the temples, and troops of courtesans swam across the Orontes.  She took part in all the pleasures of the fashionable and depraved city; and she assiduously frequented the theatres, at which clever mimes from all countries performed amidst the applause of a crowd greedy for excitement.