His voice expressed anxious tenderness for his young friend.  No one had spoken thus to Dion since his father’s death.

The Epicurus would soon reach the mouth of the harbour, and after landing he must again leave Archibius.

The decisive hour which often unites earnest men more firmly than many previous years had come to both.  They had opened their hearts to each other.  Dion had withheld only the one thing which, at the first sight of the houses in the city, filled his soul with fresh uneasiness.

It was long since he had sought counsel from others.  Many who had asked his, had left him with thanks, to do exactly the opposite of what he had advised, though it would have been to their advantage.  More than once he, too, had done the same, but now a powerful impulse urged him to confide in Archibius.  He knew Barine, and wished her the greatest happiness.  Perhaps it would be wise to let another person, who was kindly disposed, consider what his own heart so eagerly demanded and prudence forbade.

Hastily forming his resolution, he again turned to his friend, saying: 

“You have shown yourself a father to me.  Imagine that I am indeed your son, and, as such wished to confess that a woman had become dear to my heart, and to ask whether you would be glad to greet her as a daughter.”

Here Archibius interrupted him with the exclamation:  “A ray of light amid all this gloom?  Grasp what you have too long neglected as soon as possible!  It befits a good citizen to marry.  The Greek does not attain full manhood till he becomes husband and father.  If I have remained unwedded, there was a special reason for it, and how often I have envied the cobbler whom I saw standing before his shop in the evening, holding his child in his arms, or the pilot, to whom large and small hands were stretched in greeting when he returned home!  When I enter my dwelling only my dogs rejoice.  But you, whose beautiful palace stands empty, to whose proud family it is due that you should provide for its continuance—­”

“That is just what brings me into a state of indecision, which is usually foreign to my nature,” interrupted Dion.  “You know me and my position in the world, and you have also known from her earliest childhood the woman to whom I allude.”

“Iras?” asked his companion, hesitatingly.  His sister, Charmian, had told him of the love felt by the Queen’s younger waiting-woman.

But Dion eagerly denied this, adding I am speaking of Barine, the daughter of your dead friend Leonax.  I love her, yet my pride is sensitive, and I know that it will extend to my future wife.  The contemptuous glances which others might cast at her I should scorn, for I know her worth.  Surely you remember my mother:  she was a very different woman.  Her house, her child, the slaves, her loom, were everything to her.  She rigidly exacted from other women the chaste reserve which was a marked trait