The sudden leap with which he sprang from his seat to welcome her, the frank laughter with which he several times interrupted her speech, the childlike loving way in which he held his arm round his little mother while he greeted her, and asked why she was going out so late, the winning, touching tone of his voice as he expressed his regret at Selene’s mishaps—­all went home to Arsinoe as a thing known and loved, of which she had long been deprived, and she clung to the two strong hands he held out to her.  If at that moment he had taken her up, and clasped her to his heart before the very eyes of Eupliorion and his mother she really would have been incapable of resisting him.

It was with a heavy heart that Arsinoe had gone into dame Doris, but in the gate-keeper’s house there reigned an atmosphere in which care and anxiety could not breathe, and the light-hearted girl’s vision of her sister as tormented with pain and threatened with danger was changed in a wonderfully short time to that of a sufferer comfortably in bed, with only a severely-injured foot.  In the place of consuming anxiety she felt only hearty sympathy, and this sounded in her voice as she begged the singer Euphorion to open the gate for her, because she wanted to go out with her slave-woman to ascertain how Selene was.

Doris soothed her, repeating her assurance that the patient would be nursed with the utmost care in dame Hannah’s hands; still, she thought her wish to see her sister very justifiable, and eagerly seconded Pollux when he entreated Arsinoe to accept his escort; for the festival would be beginning soon after midnight, the streets would be full of rough and impudent people, and a bunch of feathers would be about as much use against the drunken slaves as her black scarecrow, who had been falling into decrepitude even before she had done the stupidest deed of her life and roused the steward’s anger against herself.

So they went along the dark streets which grew full of people the farther they went, side by side in silence.  Presently Pollux said: 

“Put your arm through mine; you ought to feel that I am protecting you, and I—­I should like to feel at every step that I have found you once more, and am allowed to be near you—­so sweet a creature.”

The words did not sound impertinent, on the contrary, they sounded very much in earnest, and the sculptor’s deep voice trembled with emotion as he spoke them with deep tenderness.  They knocked at the door of the girl’s heart with the urgent hand of love; she unhesitatingly put her hand through his arm and answered softly: 

“You will take care of me now.”

“Yes,” said he, and he took her little hand, which rested on his right arm, in his left hand.  She did not draw it away, and after they had gone on thus for a few paces he sighed and said: 

“Do you know how I feel?”

“Well!”

“Nay, I myself cannot put it into words.  Rather as if I had triumphed in the Olympian games, or as if Caesar had invested me with the purple!—­But who cares for the wealth or the purple!  You are hanging on my arm, and I have hold of your hand; compared with this, all is as nought.  If it were not for the people about I—­I do not know what I could do.”