“It is that very thing,” replied Bias modestly, “which to a short-sighted fool like myself—­may the great goddess not bear me a grudge for it!—­ never seemed just in her.  Even the mortal who succumbs in a fair fight ought not to be enraged against the victor.  At least, so I was taught.  But what, I ask myself, when I think of the stones which were flung at Hermon’s struggling Maenads, could be less suited for imitation than two women, one of whom strikes the other?”

“The woman who in her desperation at that blow desires to hang herself, must produce a still more horrible impression,” replied Stephanion.  “Probably she will be represented as Athene releases her from the noose rather than when, as a punishment for her insolence, she transforms Arachne into a spider.”

“That she might be permitted, in the form of an insect, to make artistic webs until the end of her life,” the slave, now sufficiently well informed, added importantly.  “Since that transformation, as you know, the spider has been called by the Greeks Arachne.  Perhaps—­I always thought so—­Hermon will represent her twisting the rope with which she is to kill herself.  You have seen many of our works, and know that we love the terrible.”

“Oh, let me go into your studio!” the maid now entreated no less urgently than her mistress had done a short time before, but her wish, too, remained ungratified.

“The sculptors,” Bias truthfully asserted, “always kept their workrooms carefully locked.”  They were as inaccessible as the strongest fortress, and it was wise, less on account of curious spectators, from whom there was nothing to fear, than of the thievish propensities of the people.  The statues, by Archias’s orders, were to be executed in chryselephantine work, and the gold and ivory which this required might only too easily awaken the vice of cupidity in the honest and frugal Biamites.  So nothing could be done about it, not to mention the fact that he was forbidden, on pain of being sold to work in a stone quarry, to open the studio to any one without his master’s consent.

So the maid, too, was obliged to submit, and the sacrifice was rendered easier for her because, just at that moment, a young female slave called her back to the tent where Chrysilla, Daphne’s companion, a matron who belonged to a distinguished Greek family, needed her services.

Bias, rejoicing that he had at last learned, without exposing his own ignorance, the story of the much-discussed Arachne, returned to the house, where he remained until Daphne came back from shooting with her companions.  While the latter were talking about the birds they had killed, Bias went out of doors; but he was forced to give up his desire to listen to a conversation which was exactly suited to arrest his attention, for after the first few sentences he perceived behind the thorny acacias in the “garden” his countrywoman Ledscha.

So she was keeping her promise.  He recognised her plainly, in spite of the veil which covered the back of her head and the lower portion of her face.  Her black eyes were visible, and what a sinister light shone in them as she fixed them sometimes on Daphne, sometimes on Hermon, who stood talking together by the steps!