“You will see,” she said, “when he is standing face to face with his last work and there is no one by to disturb him or look at him, he will find the ends of the threads that have been cut and perhaps be able to gather them up again and go on with the work where it was interrupted.”

The mother’s heart had hit upon the right idea.  When Pollux had eaten his breakfast he went to his table exactly as he had done the clay before; but the sight of the work in hand had quite a different effect to the mere raw clay and wax.  His eyes sparkled; he walked round the table with an attentive gaze examining his work as keenly and as eagerly as if it were some fine thing he saw for the first time.  Memory revived in his mind.  He laughed aloud, clasped his hands and said to himself, “Capital!  Something may be made of that!”

His dull weariness slipped off him, as it were; a confident smile parted his lips and he seized the wax with a firm hand.  But he did not begin to work at once; he only tried whether his fingers had not lost their cunning, and whether the yielding material was obedient to his will.  The wax was no less docile to his touch than in former days, as he pinched or pulled it.  Perhaps then the tormenting thought that blighted his life, the dread that in the prison he had ceased to be an artist, and had lost all his faculty was nothing more than a mad delusion!  He must at any rate try how he could get on at the work.

No one was by to observe him—­he might dare the attempt at once.  The sweat of anguish stood in large beads on his brow as he finally concentrated his volition, shook back the hair from his face and took up a lump of the wax in both hands.  There stood the portrait of Antinous with the head only half-finished.  Now—­could he succeed in modelling that lovely head free-hand and from memory?

His breath came fast, and his hands trembled as he set to work; but soon his hand was as steady as ever, his eye was calm and keen again, and the work progressed.  The fine features of the young Bithynian were distinct to his mind’s eye, and when, about four hours after, his mother looked in at the window to see what Pollux was doing, whether her little stratagem had succeeded, she cried out with surprise, for the favorite’s bust, a likeness in every feature, stood on a plinth side by side with the original sketch.  Before she could cross the threshold her son had run to meet her, lifted her in his arms, and kissing her forehead and lips he exclaimed, radiant with delight: 

“Mother, I still can work.  Mother, mother, I am not lost!”

In the afternoon his brother came in and saw what he had been doing, and now—­and not till now—­could Teuker honestly be glad to have found his brother again.