Selene called to the old slave-woman, and desired her to remain in the sitting-room till her father should return, greeted the dealer politely, and Antinous with a careless nod, and then left the room.  The lad had followed her, and they both met the children.  Selene pulled their dresses straight, and strictly enjoined them not to go near the corridor on account of the strange dog.  Antinous stroked the blind boy’s pretty curly head, and then, as Selene was about to descend the stairs, he asked her: 

“May I help you?”

“Yes,” said the girl, for at the very first step an acute pain in the ancle checked her, and she put out her arm to the young man that he might support her elbow on his hand.  But her answer would assuredly have been “no,” if she had had the smallest feeling of liking for the Emperor’s favorite; but she bore the image of another in her heart, and did not even perceive that Antinous was beautiful.  The Bithynian’s heart, on the other hand, had never beaten so violently as during the brief moments when he was permitted to hold Selene’s arm.  He felt intoxicated, while he was alive to the fact that during the descent of the few steps she was suffering great pain.

“Stay at home, and spare yourself!” he begged her once more in a trembling voice.

“You worry me!” she said, in a tone of vexation.  “I must go, and it is not far.”

“May I accompany you?”

She laughed aloud and answered somewhat scornfully: 

“Certainly not.  Only conduct me through the corridor that the dog may not attack me again, then go where you will—­but not with me.”

He obeyed when at the end of the passage where it opened into a large hall, he bid her farewell, and she thanked him with a few friendly words.

There were two ways out from her father’s rooms into the road, one led through the rotunda where the Ptolemaic Queens were placed, and across several terraces up and down steps through the forecourt; the other, on a level all the way, through the rooms and halls of the palace.  She was forced to choose the latter, for it would have been impossible for her with her aching foot to clamber up a number of steps without help and down them again, but she came to this conclusion much against her will, for she knew what numbers of men were engaged in the works of restoration; and to get through them safely it struck her that she might ask her old playfellow to escort her through the crowd of workmen and rough slaves as far as his parent’s gatehouse.  But she did not easily decide on this course, for, since the afternoon when Pollux had shown her mother’s bust to Arsinoe before showing it to her, she had felt a grudge towards the sculptor, who so lately before had touched and opened her weary and loveless soul; and this sore feeling had not diminished, but had rather increased with time.  At every hour of the day, and whatever she was occupied in, she could not help repeating to herself, that she had every reason to be vexed with him.