CHAPTER I.

Dame Hannah had watched by Selene till sunrise and indefatigably cooled both her injured foot and the wound in her head.  The old physician was not dissatisfied with the condition of his patient, but ordered the widow to lie down for a time and to leave the care of her for a few hours to her young friend.  When Mary was alone with the sick girl and had laid the fresh cold handkerchief in its place, Selene turned her face towards her and said: 

“Then you were at Lochias yesterday.  Tell me how you found them all there.  Who guided you to our lodgings and did you see my little brother and sisters?”

“You are not yet quite free of fever, and I do not know how much I ought to talk to you—­but I would with all my heart.”

The words were spoken kindly and there was a deep loving light in the eyes of the deformed girl as she said them.  Selene excited not merely her sympathy and pity, but her admiration too, for she was so beautiful, so totally different from herself, and in every little service she rendered her, she felt like some despised beggar whom a prince might have permitted to wait upon him.  Her hump had never seemed to her so bent, nor her brown skin so ugly at any other time as it did to-day, when side by side with this symmetrical and delicate girlish form, rounded to such tender contours.

But Mary felt not the smallest movement of envy.  She only felt happy to help Selene, to serve her, to be allowed to gaze at her although she was a heathen.  During the night too, she had prayed fervently that the Lord might graciously draw to himself this lovely, gentle creature, that He might permit her to recover, and fill her soul with the same love for the Saviour that gave joy to her own.  More than once she had longed to kiss her, but she dared not, for it seemed to her as though the sick girl were made of finer stuff than she herself.

Selene felt tired, very tired, and as the pain diminished, a comfortable sense stole over her of peace and respite in the silent and loving homeliness of her surroundings; a feeling that was new and very soothing, though it was interrupted, now and again, by her anxiety for those at home.  Dame Hannah’s presence did her good, for she fancied she recognized in her voice something that had been peculiar to her mother’s, when she had played with her and pressed her with special affection to her heart.

In the papyrus factory, at the gumming-table, the sight of the little hunchback had disgusted Selene, but here she observed what good eyes she had, and how kind a voice, and the care with which Mary lifted the compress from her foot—­as softly, as if in her own hands she felt the pain that Selene was suffering—­and then laid another on the broken ankle, aroused her gratitude.  Her sister Arsinoe was a vain and thorough Alexandrian girl, and she had nicknamed the poor thing after the ugliest of the Hellenes who had besieged Troy.  “Dame Thersites,” and Selene herself had often repeated it.  Now she forgot the insulting name altogether, and met the objections of her nurse by saying: