Hitherto not a word had been spoken.  Now Gorgias called to Barine:  “This passage is low—­you must stoop.  Cover your head, and don’t be afraid if you meet bats.  They have long been undisturbed.  We might have taken you from the temple to the sea, and waited there, but it would probably have attracted attention and been dangerous.  Courage, young wife of Dion!  The corridor is long, and walking through it is difficult; but compared with the road to the mines, it is as smooth and easy as the Street of the King.  If you think of your destination, the bats will seem like the swallows which announce the approach of spring.”

Barine nodded gratefully to him; but she kissed the hand of Dion, who was moving forward painfully, leaning on the arm of his friend.  The light of the torch carried by Gorgias’s faithful foreman, who led the way, had fallen on her blackened arm, and when the little party advanced she kept behind the others.  She thought it might be unpleasant for her lover to see her thus disfigured, and spared him, though she would gladly have remained nearer.  As soon as the passage grew lower, the wounded man’s friends took him in their arms, and their task was a hard one, for they were not only obliged to move onward bending low under the heavy burden, but also to beat off the bats which, frightened by the foreman’s torch, flew up in hosts.

Barine’s hair was covered, it is true, but at any other time the hideous creatures, which often brushed against her head and arms, would have filled her with horror and loathing.  Now she scarcely heeded them; her eyes were fixed on the recumbent figure in the bearers’ arms, the man to whom she belonged, body and soul, and whose patient suffering pierced her inmost heart.  His head rested on the breast of Gorgias, who walked directly in front of her; the architect’s stooping posture concealed his face, but his feet were visible and, whenever they twitched, she fancied he was in pain.  Then she longed to press forward to his side, wipe the perspiration from his brow in the hot, low corridor, and whisper words of love and encouragement.

This she was sometimes permitted to do when the friends put down their heavy burden.  True, they allowed themselves only brief intervals of rest, but they were long enough to show her how the sufferer’s strength was failing.  When they at last reached their destination, Philotas was forced to exert all his strength to support the exhausted man, while Gorgias cautiously opened the door.  It led to a flight of sea-washed steps close to the garden of Didymus, which as a child she had often used with her brother to float a little boat upon the water.

The architect opened the door only a short distance; he was expected, for Barine soon heard him whisper, and suddenly the door was flung wide.  A tall man raised Dion and bore him into the open air.  While she was still gazing after him, a second figure of equal size approached her and, hastily begging her permission, lifted her in his arms like a child, and as she inhaled the cool night air and felt the water through which her bearer waded splash up and wet her feet, her eyes sought her new-made husband—­but in vain; the night was very dark, and the lights on the shore did not reach this spot so far below the walls of the quay.