the polished surface of the dark marble.  The thick sandals she had tied on to her feet roused loud echoes in the empty rooms as they fell on the stone pavements, and terror possessed Selene’s anxious soul.  Her fingers trembled as they held the lamp and her heart beat audibly as, with bated breath, she went through the cupolaed hall in which Ptolemy Euergetes ‘the fat’ was said, some years ago, to have murdered his own son, and in which even a deep breath roused an echo.

But even in this room she did not forget to look to the right and left for her father.  She breathed a sigh of relief when she perceived a streak of light which shone through the gaping rift of a cracked side-door of the hall of the Muses and fell in a broken reflection on the floor and the wall of the last room through which she had to pass.  She now entered the large hall which was dimly lighted by the lamps behind the sculptor’s screen, and by several tapers, now burnt down low.  These were standing on a table knocked together out of blocks of wood and planks at the extreme end of the hall, and behind this her father was sound asleep.

The deep notes brought out of the sleeper’s broad chest, were echoed in a very uncanny way from the bare walls of the vast empty room, and she was frightened by them and still more by the long black shadows of the pillars, that lay, like barriers, across her path.  She stood listening in the middle of the hall and soon recognized in the alarming tones a sound that was only too familiar.  Without a moment’s hesitation she started to run, and hastened to the sleeper, shook him, pushed him, called him, sprinkled his forehead with water, and appealed to him by the tenderest names with which her sister Arsinoe was wont to coax him.  When, in spite of all this, he neither spoke nor stirred, she flung the full light of the lamp on his face.  Then she thought she perceived that a bluish tinge had overspread his bloated features, and she broke into the deep, agonized, weeping which, a few hours previously had touched the architect’s heart.

There was a sudden stir behind the screens which enclosed the sculptor and the work in progress.  Pollux had been working for a long time with zeal and pleasure, but at last the steward’s snoring had begun to disturb him.  The body of the Muse had already taken a definite form and he could begin to work out the head with the earliest dawn of day.  He now dropped his arms wearily, for as soon as he ceased to create with his whole heart and mind he felt tired, and saw plainly that without a model he could do nothing satisfactory with the drapery of his Urania.  So he pulled his stool up to a great chest full of gypsum to get a little repose by leaning against it.