“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!”

She had lost all sense of time and of her immediate surroundings, and long-forgotten sorrows crowded on her memory:  The dreadful day when a young freedman—­a gifted astronomer and philosopher who had been appointed her tutor, and whom she had loved with all the passion of a vehement nature—­had been kicked out of her father’s house by slaves, for daring to aspire to her hand.  She had given him up—­she had been forced to do so; and after she was the wife of another and he had risen to fame, she had never given him any token that she had not forgotten him.  Two thirds of a century lay between that happy and terrible time, and the present.  He had been dead many a long year, and still she remembered him, and was thinking of him even now.  A singular effort of fancy showed her herself, as she had then been, and Gorgo—­whom she saw not with her bodily eyes, though the girl was standing in front of her—­two young creatures side by side.  The two were but one in her vision; the same anguish that embittered one life now threatened the other.  But after all she, Damia, had dragged this grief after her through the weary decades, like the iron ball at the end of a chain which keeps the galley-slave to his place at the oar, and from which he can no more escape than from a ponderous and ever-present shadow; and Gorgo’s sorrow could not at any rate be for long, since the end of all things was at hand—­it was coming slowly but with inevitable certainty, nearer and nearer every hour.