“As a girl she must have had still more hair, and perhaps she may have been as fair as I was—­I am brown now.”

“Another thing you inherit from her is that your hair, without being curly, lies upon your head in such soft waves.”

“It is easy to keep in order.”

“Are not you taller than she was?”

“I fancy so, but as she was stouter she looked shorter.  Will you soon have done?”

“You are getting tired of standing?”

“Not very.”

“Then have a little more patience.  Your face reminds me more and more of our early years; I should be glad to see Arsinoe once more.  I feel at this moment as if time had moved backwards a good piece.  Have you the same feeling?”

Selene shook her head.

“You are not happy?”

“No.”

“I know full well that you have very heavy duties to perform for your age.”

“Things go as they may.”

“Nay, nay.  I know you do not let things go haphazard.  You take care of your brothers and sisters like a mother.”

“Like a mother!” repeated Selene, and she smiled a bitter negative.

“Of course a mother’s love is a thing by itself, but your father and the little ones have every reason to be satisfied with yours.”

“The little ones are perhaps, and Helios who is blind, but Arsinoe does what she can.”

“You certainly are not content, I can hear it in your voice, and you used formerly to be as merry and happy as your sister, though perhaps not so saucy.”

“Formerly—­”

“How sadly that sounds!  And yet you are handsome, you are young, and life lies before you.”

“But what a life!”

“Well, what?” asked the sculptor, and taking his hands from his work he looked ardently at the fair pale girl before him and cried out fervently: 

“A life which might be full of happiness and satisfied affection.”

The girl shook her head in negation and answered coldly: 

“‘Love is joy,’ says the Christian woman who superintends us at work in the papyrus factory, and since my mother died I have had no love.  I enjoyed all my share of happiness once for all in my childhood, now I am content if only we are spared the worst misfortunes.  Otherwise I take what each day brings, because I can not do otherwise.  My heart is empty, and if I ever feel anything keenly, it is dread.  I have long since ceased to expect any thing good of the future.”

“Girl!” exclaimed Pollux.  “Why, what has been happening to you?  I do not understand half of what you are saying.  How came you in the papyrus factory?”

“Do not betray me,” begged Selene.  “If my father were to hear of it.”

“He is asleep, and what you confide to me no one will ever hear of again.”

“Why should I conceal it?  I go every day with Arsinoe for two hours to the manufactory, and we work there to earn a little money.”