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.

Barine was frightened; but a few minutes after the outlines of a large fishing boat loomed through the darkness, dimly illumined by the harbour lights, and the next instant the giant who carried her placed her on the deck, and a deep voice whispered:  “All’s well.  I’ll bring some wine at once.”

Then Barine saw her husband lying motionless on a couch which had been prepared for him in the prow of the boat.  Bending over him, she perceived that he had fainted, and while rubbing his forehead with the wine, raising his head on her lap, cheering him, and afterwards by the light of a small lantern carefully renewing the bandage on his shoulder, she did not notice that the vessel was moving through the water until the boatman set the triangular sail.

She had not been told where the boat was bearing her, and she did not ask.  Any spot that she could share with Dion was welcome.  The more lonely the place, the more she could be to him.  How her heart swelled with gratitude and love!  When she bent over him, kissed his forehead, and felt how feverishly it burned, she thought, “I will nurse you back to health,” and raised her eyes and soul to her favourite god, to whom she owed the gift of song, and who understood everything beautiful and pure, to thank Phoebus Apollo and beseech him to pour his rays the next morning on a convalescent man.  While she was still engaged in prayer the boat touched the shore.  Again strong arms bore her and Dion to the land, and when her foot touched the solid earth, her rescuer, the freedman Pyrrhus, broke the silence, saying:  “Welcome, wife of Dion, to our island!  True, you must be satisfied to take us as we are.  But if you are as content with us as we are glad to serve you and your lord, who is ours also, the hour of leave-taking will be far distant.”