“Did you hear the neighing of those mettlesome horses?  They brought me hither, and I can guide them well; nay, at the last Isthmian games I won the crown with my own quadriga.  You said you had never ridden standing in a chariot.  How would you like to try for once how it feels?  I will drive you with pleasure up and down behind the grove for a little while.”

Irene heard this proposal with sparkling eyes and cried, as she clapped her hands: 

“May I ride in a chariot with spirited horses, like the queen?  Oh! impossible!  Where are your horses standing?”

In this instant she had forgotten Klea, the duty which called her back to the temple, even her parents, and she followed the Corinthian with winged steps, sprang into the two-wheeled chariot, and clung fast to the breastwork, as Lysias took his place by her side, seized the reins, and with a strong and practised hand curbed the mettle of his spirited steeds.

She stood perfectly guileless and undoubting by his side, and wholly at his mercy as the chariot rattled off; but, unknown to herself, beneficent powers were shielding her with buckler and armor—­her childlike innocence, and that memory of her parents which her tempter himself had revived in her mind, and which soon came back in vivid strength.

Breathing deep with excitement, and filled with such rapture as a bird may feel when it first soars from its narrow nest high up into the ether she cried out again and again: 

“Oh, this is delightful! this is splendid!” and then: 

“How we rush through the air as if we were swallows!  Faster, Lysias, faster!  No, no—­that is too fast; wait a little that I may not fall!  Oh, I am not frightened; it is too delightful to cut through the air just as a Nile boat cuts through the stream in a storm, and to feel it on my face and neck.”

Lysias was very close to her; when, at her desire, he urged his horses to their utmost pace, and saw her sway, he involuntarily put out his hand to hold her by the girdle; but Irene avoided his grasp, pressing close against the side of the chariot next her, and every time he touched her she drew her arm close up to her body, shrinking together like the fragile leaf of a sensitive plant when it is touched by some foreign object.

She now begged the Corinthian to allow her to hold the reins for a little while, and he immediately acceded to her request, giving them into her hand, though, stepping behind her, he carefully kept the ends of them in his own.  He could now see her shining hair, the graceful oval of her head, and her white throat eagerly bent forward; an indescribable longing came over him to press a kiss on her head; but he forbore, for he remembered his friend’s words that he would fulfil the part of a guardian to these girls.  He too would be a protector to her, aye and more than that, he would care for her as a father might.  Still, as often as the chariot jolted over a stone,