“I will come—­I will be sure to come,” cried Irene loudly and eagerly, “and shall I bring Klea with me?  She was called up in the middle of the night by the gatekeeper, whose child is very ill.  My sister is very fond of it, and Philo will only take his medicine from her.  The little one had gone to sleep in her lap, and his mother came and begged me to fetch the water for us both.  Now give me the jars, for none but we may enter the temple.”

“There they are.  Do not disturb your sister on my account in her care of the poor little boy, for I might indeed have one or two things to say to you which she need not hear, and which might give you pleasure.  Now, I am going back to the well, so farewell!  But do not let me have to wait very long for you.”  He spoke in a tender tone of entreaty, and the girl answered low and rapidly as she hurried away from him: 

“I will come when the sun is up.”

The Corinthian looked after her till she had vanished within the temple, and his heart was stirred—­stirred as it had not been for many years.  He could not help recalling the time when he would teaze his younger sister, then still quite a child, putting her to the test by asking her, with a perfectly grave face, to give him her cake or her apple which he did not really want at all.  The little one had almost always put the thing he asked for to his mouth with her tiny hands, and then he had often felt exactly as he felt now.

Irene too was still but a child, and no less guileless than his darling in his own home; and just as his sister had trusted him—­offering him the best she had to give—­so this simple child trusted him; him, the profligate Lysias, before whom all the modest women of Corinth cast down their eyes, while fathers warned their growing-up sons against him; trusted him with her virgin self—­nay, as he thought, her sacred person.

“I will do thee no harm, sweet child!” he murmured to himself, as he presently turned on his heel to return to the well.  He went forward quickly at first, but after a few steps he paused before the marvellous and glorious picture that met his gaze.  Was Memphis in flames?  Had fire fallen to burn up the shroud of mist which had veiled his way to the temple?

The trunks of the acacia-trees stood up like the blackened pillars of a burning city, and behind them the glow of a conflagration blazed high up to the heavens.  Beams of violet and gold slipped and sparkled between the boughs, and danced among the thorny twigs, the white racemes of flowers, and the tufts of leaves with their feathery leaflets; the clouds above were fired with tints more pure and tender than those of the roses with which Cleopatra had decked herself for the banquet.

Not like this did the sun rise in his own country!  Or, was it perhaps only that in Corinth or in Athens at break of day, as he staggered home drunk from some feast, he had looked more at the earth than at the heavens?