And if this were possible, if these two could be happy in love and honor, should she Klea come between the couple to divide them?  Should she jealously snatch Irene from his arms and carry her back to the gloomy temple which now—­after she had fluttered awhile in sportive freedom in the sunny air—­would certainly seem to her doubly sinister and unendurable?  Should she be the one to plunge Irene into misery—­Irene, her child, the treasure confided to her care, whom she had sworn to cherish?

“No, and again no,” she said resolutely.  “She was born for happiness, and I for endurance, and if I dare beseech thee to grant me one thing more, O thou infinite Divinity! it is that Thou wouldst cut out from my soul this love which is eating into my heart as though it were rotten wood, and keep me far from envy and jealousy when I see her happy in his arms.  It is hard—­very hard to drive one’s own heart out into the desert in order that spring may blossom in that of another:  but it is well so—­ and my mother would commend me and my father would say I had acted after his own heart, and in obedience to the teaching of the great men on these pedestals.  Be still, be still my aching heart—­there—­that is right!”

Thus reflecting she went past the busts of Zeno and Chrysippus, glancing at their features distinct in the moonlight:  and her eyes falling on the smooth slabs of stone with which the open space was paved, her own shadow caught her attention, black and sharply defined, and exactly resembling that of some man travelling from one town to another in his cloak and broad-brimmed hat.

“Just like a man!” she muttered to herself; and as, at the same moment, she saw a figure resembling her own, and, like herself, wearing a hat, appear near the entrance to the tombs, and fancied she recognized it as Publius, a thought, a scheme, flashed through her excited brain, which at first appalled her, but in the next instant filled her with the ecstasy which an eagle may feel when he spreads his mighty wings and soars above the dust of the earth into the pure and infinite ether.  Her heart beat high, she breathed deeply and slowly, but she advanced to meet the Roman, drawn up to her full height like a queen, who goes forward to receive some equal sovereign; her hat, which she had taken off, in her left hand, and the Smith’s key in her right-straight on towards the door of the Apis-tombs.

CHAPTER XXI.

The man whom Klea had seen was in fact none other than Publius.  He was now at the end of a busy day, for after he had assured himself that Irene had been received by the sculptor and his wife, and welcomed as if she were their own child, he had returned to his tent to write once more a dispatch to Rome.  But this he could not accomplish, for his friend Lysias paced restlessly up and down by him as he sat, and as often as he put the reed to the papyrus disturbed him with enquiries about the recluse, the sculptor, and their rescued protegee.