Porphyrius gave his instructions to the young men who now entered the hall, hurried them off, clasped Gorgo in a tender embrace and then bent over his mother to kiss her—­a thing he had not done for many a day.  Old Damia laid aside her stick, and taking her son’s face in both her withered hands, muttered a few words which were half a fond appeal and half a magical formula, and then the women were alone.  For a long while both were silent.  The old woman sat sunk in her arm-chair while Gorgo stood with her back against the pedestal of a bust of Plato, gazing meditatively at the ground.  At last it was Damia who spoke, asking to be carried into the women’s rooms.

Gorgo, however, stopped her with a gesture, went close to her and said:  “No, wait a minute, mother; first you must hear what I have to say.”

“What you have to say?” asked her grandmother, shrugging her shoulders.

“Yes.  I have never deceived you; but one thing I have hitherto concealed from you because I was never till this morning sure of it myself—­now I am.  Now I know that I love him.”

“The Christian?” said the old woman, pushing aside a shade that screened her eyes.

“Yes, Constantine; I will not hear you abuse him.”  Damia laughed sharply, and said in a tone of supreme scorn: 

“You will not?  Then you had better stop your ears, my dear, for as long as my tongue can wag. . . .”

“Hush, grandmother, say no more,” said the girl resolutely.  “Do not provoke me with more than I can bear.  Eros has pierced me later than he does most girls and has done it but once, but how deeply you can never know.  If you speak ill of him you only aggravate the wound and you would not be so cruel!  Do not—­I entreat you; drop the subject or else. . .”

“Or else?”

“Or else I must die, mother—­and you know you love me.”

Her tone was soft but firm; her words referred to the future, but that future was as clear to Gorgo’s view as if it were past.  Damia gave a hasty, sidelong glance at her grandchild, and a cold chill ran through her; the—­girl stood and spoke with an air of inspiration—­she was full of the divinity as Damia thought, and the old woman herself felt as though she were in a temple and in the immediate presence of the Immortals.

Gorgo waited for a reply, but in vain; and as her grandmother remained silent she went back to her place by the pedestal.  At last Damia raised her wrinkled face, looked straight in the girl’s eyes and asked: 

“And what is to be the end of it?”

“Aye—­what?” said Gorgo gloomily and she shook her head.  “I ask myself and can find no answer, for his image is ever present to me and yet walls and mountains stand between us.  That face, that image—­I might perhaps force myself to shatter it; but nothing shall ever induce me to let it be defiled or disgraced!  Nothing!”

The old woman sank into brooding thought once more; mechanically she repeated Gorgo’s last word, and at intervals that gradually became longer she murmured, at last scarcely audibly:  “Nothing—­nothing!”