The singer was not usually inquisitive, but on this occasion he never ceased asking questions till Doris led her son to the bed she had freshly made for him.  After the artist had gone to rest, the old woman once more slipped into his room, kissed his forehead, and said: 

“To-day you have still been thinking too much of that hideous prison—­but to-morrow my boy, to-morrow you will be the same as before, will you not?”

“Only leave me alone mother; I shall soon be better,” he replied.  “This bed is as good as a sleeping-draught; the plank in the prison was quite a different thing.”

“You have never asked once for your Arsinoe,” said Doris.

“What can she matter to me?  Only let me sleep.”  But the next morning Pollux was just the same as he had been the previous evening, and as the days went on his condition remained unchanged.  His head drooped on his breast, he never spoke but when he was spoken to, and when Doris or Euphorion tried to talk to him of the future, he would ask:  “Am I a burden to you?” or begged them not to worry him.

Still, he was gentle and kind, took his sister’s children in his arms, played with the Graces, whistled to the birds, went in and out, and played a valiant part at every meal.  Now and again he would ask after Arsinoe.  Once he allowed himself to be guided to the house where she lived, but he would not knock at Paulina’s door and seemed overawed by the grandeur of the house.  After he had been brooding and dreaming for a week, so idle, listless, and absent that his mother’s heart was filled with anxious fears every time she looked at him, his brother Teuker hit upon a happy idea.

The young gem-cutter was not usually a frequent visitor to his parents’ house, but since the return of the hapless Pollux he called there almost daily.  His apprenticeship was over and he seemed on the high-road to become a great master in his art; nevertheless he esteemed his brother’s gifts as far beyond his own and had tried to devise some means of reawakening the dormant energies of the luckless man’s brain.

“It was at this table,” said Teuker to his mother, “that Pollux used to sit.  This evening I will bring in a lump of clay and a good piece of modelling wax.  Just put it all on the table and lay his tools by the side of it; perhaps when he sees them he will take a fancy again to work.  If he can only make up his mind to model even a doll for the children he will soon get into the vein again, and he will go on from small things to great.”

Teuker brought the materials, Doris set them out with the modelling tools, and next morning watched her son’s proceedings with an anxious heart.  He got up late, as be had always done since his return home, and sat a long time over the bowl of porridge which his mother had prepared for his breakfast.  Then he sauntered across to his table, stood in front of it awhile, broke off a piece of clay and kneaded and moulded it in his fingers into balls and cylinders, looked at one of them more closely and then, flinging it on the ground, he said, as he leaned across the table supporting himself on both hands to put his face near his mother’s: