“We will hope so.  It is only the misled, deceived, abused Cleopatra whom I fear; for she herself is matchless in divine goodness.  The charm by which she ensnares hearts is indescribable, and the iron power of her intellect!  I tell you, Dion—­”

“Friend, friend,” was the laughing interruption.  “How high your wishes soar!  For three years I have kept an account of the conflagrations in your heart.  I believe we had reached seventeen; but this last one is equal to two.”

“Folly!” cried Gorgias in an irritated tone:  “May not a man admire what is magnificent, wonderful, unique?  She is all these things!  Just now—­ how long ago is it?—­she appeared before me in a radiance of beauty—­”

“Which should have made you shade both eyes.  Yet you have been speaking so warmly of your young guest, her loving caution, her gentle calmness in the midst of peril—­”

“Do you suppose I wish to recall a single syllable?” the architect indignantly broke in.  “Helena has no peer among the maidens of Alexandria—­but the other—­Cleopatra—­is elevated in her divine majesty above all ordinary mortals.  You might spare me and yourself that scornful curl of the lip.  Had she gazed into your face with those tearful, sorrowful eyes, as she did into mine, and spoken of her misery, you would have gone through fire and water, hand in hand with me, for her sake.  I am not a man who is easily moved, and since my father’s death the only tears I have seen have been shed by others; but when she talked of the mausoleum I was to build for her because Fate, she knew not how soon, might force her to seek refuge in the arms of death, my calmness vanished.  Then, when she cumbered me among the friends on whom she could rely and held out her hand—­a matchless hand—­oh! laugh if you choose—­ I felt I know not how, and kneeling at her feet I kissed it; it was wet with my tears.  I am not ashamed of this emotion, and my lips seem consecrated since they touched the little white hand which spoke a language of its own and stands before my eyes wherever I gaze.”

Pushing back his thick locks from his brow as he spoke, he shook his head as though dissatisfied with himself and, in an altered tone, hurriedly continued:  “But this is a time ill-suited for such ebullitions of feeling.  I mentioned the mausoleum, whose erection the Queen desires.  She will see the first hasty sketch to-morrow.  It is already before my mind’s eye.  She wished to have it adjoin the Temple of Isis, her goddess—­I proposed the great sanctuary in the Rhakotis quarter, but she objected—­she wished to have it close to the palace at Lochias.  She had thought of the temple at the Corner of the Muses, but the house occupied by Didymus stood in the way of a larger structure.  If this were removed it would be possible to carry the street through the old man’s garden, perhaps even to the sea-shore, and we should have had space for a gigantic edifice and still left room for a fine