Antinous made no answer, but slowly went back to his litter.

“To-morrow perhaps, if I cannot manage it tonight,” he thought to himself as be went; and he never thought of any other means of attaining his end, much as he longed for it.  A hindrance that came in his way ceased to be a hindrance as soon as he had left it behind him, and after this reflection he acted on this occasion as on many former ones.  The litter was no longer standing where he had left it; the bearers had carried it into the lane leading to the sea, for the only little abode which stood on the eastern side of it belonged to a fisherman whose wife sold thin potations of Pelusium beer.

Antinous went down the green alley overarched with boughs of fig, to call the negroes who were sitting in the dull light of a smoky oil-lamp.  Here it was dark, but at the end of the alley the sea shone and sparkled in the moonlight; the splashing of the waves tempted him onwards and he loitered clown to the stone-bound shore.  There he spied a boat dancing on the water between two piles and it came into his head that it might be possible to see the house where Selene was sleeping, from the sea.

He undid the rope which secured the boat without any difficulty; he seated himself in it, laid aside the quiver and bow, pushed off with one of the oars that lay at the bottom of the boat and pulled with steady strokes towards the long path of light where the moon touched the crest of each dancing wavelet with unresting tremulous flecks of silver.

There lay the widow’s garden.  In that small white house must the fair pale Selene be sleeping, but though he rowed hither and thither, backwards and forwards, he could not succeed in discovering the window of which Pollux had spoken.  Might it not be possible to find a spot where he could disembark and then make his way into the garden?  He could see two little boats, but they lay in a narrow walled canal and this was closed by an iron railing.  Beyond, was a, terrace projecting into the sea, and surrounded by an elegant balustrade of little columns, but it rose straight out of the sea on smooth high walls.  But there—­what was that gleaming under the two palm-trees which, springing from the same root, had grown together tall and slender—­was not that a flight of marble steps leading down to the sea?

Antinous dipped his right oar in the waves with a practised hand to alter the head of the boat and was in the act of pulling his hand up to make his stroke against the pressure of the waves—­but he did not complete the movement, nay he counteracted the stroke by a dexterous reverse action; a strange vision arrested his attention.  On the terrace, which lay full in the bright moonlight, there appeared a white-robed figure with long floating hair.

How strangely it moved!  It went now to one side and now to the other, then again it stood still and clasped its head in its hands.  Antinous shuddered, he could not help thinking of the Daimons of which Hadrian so often spoke.  They were said to be of half-divine and half-human nature, and sometimes appeared in the guise of mortals.