“Certainly—­and you will give nothing to yonder brawler.”

“On the contrary.  I feel very generous.  If Peitho will aid me, the insatiate fellow will get more than may be agreeable to him.”

Then grasping the architect’s hand, Dion forced his way through the throng surrounding the high platform on wheels, upon which the closely covered piece of sculpture had been rolled up.  The gate of the scholar’s house stood open, for an officer in the Regent’s service had really entered a short time before, but the Scythian guards sent by the exegetus Demetrius, one of Barine’s friends, were keeping back the throng of curious spectators.

Their commander knew Gorgias, and he was soon standing in the impluvium of the scholar’s house, an oblong, rootless space, with a fountain in the centre, whose spray moistened the circular bed of flowers around it.  The old slave had just lighted some three-branched lamps which burned on tall stands.  The officers sent by the Regent to inform Didymus that his garden would be converted into a public square had just arrived.

When Gorgias entered, these magistrates, their clerks, and the witnesses accompanying them—­a group of twenty men, at whose head was Apollonius, a distinguished officer of the royal treasury—­were in the house.  The slave who admitted the architect informed him of it.

In the atrium a young girl, doubtless a member of the household, stopped him.  He was not mistaken in supposing that she was Helena, Didymus’s younger granddaughter, of whom Barine had spoken.  True, she resembled her sister neither in face nor figure, for while the young matron’s hair was fair and waving, the young girl’s thick black tresses were wound around her head in a smooth braid.  Very unlike Barine’s voice, too, were the deep, earnest tones trembling with emotion, in which she confronted him with the brief question, concealing a faint reproach, “Another demand?”

After first ascertaining that he was really speaking to Helena, his friend’s sister, he hastily told her his name, adding that, on the contrary, he had come to protect her grandfather from a serious misfortune.

When his glance first rested upon her in the dimly lighted room, the impression she made upon him was by no means favourable.  The pure brow, which seemed to him too high for a woman’s face, wore an indignant frown; and though her mouth was beautiful in form, its outlines were often marred by a passionate tremor that lent the exquisitely chiselled features a harsh, nay, bitter expression.  But she had scarcely heard the motive of his presence ere, pressing her hand upon her bosom with a sigh of relief, she eagerly exclaimed: 

“Oh, do what you can to avert this terrible deed!  No one knows how the old man loves this house.  And my grandmother!  They will die if it is taken from them.”

Her large eyes rested upon him with a warm, imploring light; and the stern, almost repellent voice thrilled with love for her relatives.  He must lend his aid here, and how gladly he would do so!  He assured her of this; and Helena, who had heard him mentioned as a man of ability, saw in him a helper in need, and begged him, with touching fervour, to show her grandfather, when he came before the officers, that all was not lost.