Publius heeded not this glance, but walked quickly towards the acacia-grove; the recluse looked after the ill-matched pair, and as he watched the burly Eulaeus following the young man, he put both his hands on his hips, puffed out his fat cheeks, and burst into loud laughter as soon as the couple had vanished behind the acacias.

When once Serapion’s midriff was fairly tickled it was hard to reduce it to calm again, and he was still laughing when Klea appeared in front of his cell some few minutes after the departure of the Roman.  He was about to receive his young friend with a cheerful greeting, but, glancing at her face, he cried anxiously;

“You look as if you had met with a ghost; your lips are pale instead of red, and there are dark shades round your eyes.  What has happened to you, child?  Irene went with you to the procession, that I know.  Have you had bad news of your parents?  You shake your head.  Come, child, perhaps you are thinking of some one more than you ought; how the color rises in your cheeks!  Certainly handsome Publius, the Roman, must have looked into your eyes—­a splendid youth is he—­a fine young man—­a capital good fellow—­”

“Say no more on that subject,” Klea exclaimed, interrupting her friend and protector, and waving her hand in the air as if to cut off the other half of Serapion’s speech.  “I can hear nothing more about him.”

“Has he addressed you unbecomingly?” asked the recluse.

“Yes!” said Klea, turning crimson, and with a vehemence quite foreign to her usual gentle demeanor, “yes, he persecutes me incessantly with challenging looks.”

“Only with looks?” said the anchorite.  “But we may look even at the glorious sun and at the lovely flowers as much as we please, and they are not offended.”

“The sun is too high and the soulless flowers too humble for a man to hurt them,” replied Klea.  “But the Roman is neither higher nor lower than I, the eye speaks as plain a language as the tongue, and what his eyes demand of me brings the blood to my cheeks and stirs my indignation even now when I only think of it.”

“And that is why you avoid his gaze so carefully?”

“Who told you that?”

“Publius himself; and because he is wounded by your hard-heartedness he meant to quit Egypt; but I have persuaded him to remain, for if there is a mortal living from whom I expect any good for you and yours—­”

“It is certainly not he,” said Klea positively.  “You are a man, and perhaps you now think that so long as you were young and free to wander about the world you would not have acted differently from him—­it is a man’s privilege; but if you could look into my soul or feel with the heart of a woman, you would think differently.  Like the sand of the desert which is blown over the meadows and turns all the fresh verdure to a hideous brown-like a storm that transforms the blue mirror of the sea into a crisped chaos of black whirl pools and foaming