“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 garden.  But we had learned how the philosopher loved his family estate.  The Queen is unwilling to use violence towards the old man.  She is just, and perhaps other reasons, of which I am ignorant, influence her.  So I promised to look for another site, though I saw how much she desired to have her tomb connected with the sanctuary of her favourite goddess Then—­I have already told the clever brown witch—­then the immortals, Divinity, Fate, or whatever we call the power which guides the world and our lives according to eternal laws and its own mysterious, omnipotent will, permitted a rascally deed, from which I think may come deliverance for you and a source of pleasure to the Queen in these days of trial.”