The soldiers laughed again,—­their commander looked at him a little curiously.

“Nay, art thou one of the escaped of Lysia’s lovers?” he asked, suspiciously—­“And has the Silver Nectar failed of its usual action, and driven thy senses to the winds, that thou ravest thus?  For if thou art a stranger and knowest naught of us, how speakest thou our language? ...  Why wearest thou the garb of our citizens?”

Alwyn shrank and shivered as though he had received a deadening blow,—­an awful, inexplicable chill horror froze his blood.  It was true! ... he understood the language spoken! ... it was perfectly familiar to him,—­more so than his own native tongue,—­stop! what was his native tongue?

He tried to think—­and, the sick fear at his heart grew stronger, —­he could not remember a word of it!  And his dress! ... he glanced at it dismayed and appalled,—­he had not noticed it till now.  It bore some resemblance to the costume of ancient Greece, and consisted of a white linen tunic and loose upper vest, both garments being kept in place by a belt of silver.  From this belt depended a sheathed dagger, a square writing tablet, and a pencil-shaped implement which he immediately recognized as the antique form of stylus.  His feet were shod with sandals—­his arms were bare to the shoulder, and clasped at the upper part by two broad silver armlets richly chased.

Noting all these details, the fantastic awfulness of his position smote him with redoubled force,—­and he felt as a madman may feel when his impending doom has not entirely asserted itself,—­when only grotesque and leering suggestions of madness cloud his brain,—­when hideous faces, dimly discerned, loom out of the chaos of his nightly visions,—­and when all the air seems solid darkness, with one white line of fire cracking it asunder in the midst, and that the fire of his own approaching frenzy.  Such a delirium of agony possessed Alwyn at that moment,—­he could have shrieked, laughed, groaned, wept, and fallen down in the dust before these bearded armed men, praying them to slay him with their weapons there where he stood, and put him mercifully and at once out of his mysterious misery.  But an invisible influence stronger than himself, prevented him from becoming altogether the victim of his own torturing emotions, and he remained erect and still as a marble figure, with a wondering, white piteous face of such unutterable affliction that the officer who watched him seemed touched, and, advancing, clapped his shoulder in a friendly manner.

“Come, come!” he said—­“Thou need’st fear nothing,—­we are not the men to blab of thy trespass against the city’s edict,—­for, of a truth, there is too much whispering away of young and goodly lives nowadays.  What!—­thou art not the first gay gallant, nor wilt thou be the last, that has seen the world turn upside down in a haze of love and late feasting!  If thou hast not slept long enough, why sleep again an thou wilt,—­but not here...”