Thyone drew the girl away with her into the ship’s cabin.

A short time after, the steward Gras went to Hermon to entreat him to yield to Thyone’s entreaties and leave the deck.

The leech had directed the sufferer to protect himself from draughts and dampness, and the cool night mists were rising more and more densely from the water.

Hermon doubtless felt them, but the thought of returning to the close cabin was unendurable.  He fancied that his torturing thoughts would stifle him in the gloom where even fresh air was denied him.

He allowed the careful Bithynian to throw a coverlet over him and draw the hood of his cloak over his head, but his entreaties and warnings were futile.

The steward’s watchful nursing reminded Hermon of his own solicitude for his friend and of his faithful slave Bias, both of whom he had lost.  Then he remembered the eulogy of the grammateus, and it brought up the question whether Myrtilus would have agreed with him.  Like Proclus, his keen-sighted and honest friend had called Daphne the best model for the kindly goddess.  He, too, had given to his statue the features of the daughter of Archias, and admitted that he had been less successful.  But the figure!  Perhaps he, Hermon, in his perpetual dissatisfaction with himself had condemned his own work too severely, but that it lacked the proper harmony had escaped neither Myrtilus nor himself.  Now he recalled the whole creation to his remembrance, and its weaknesses forced themselves upon him so strongly and objectionably that the extravagant praise of the stern critic awakened fresh doubts in his mind.

Yet a man like the grammateus, who on the morrow or the day following it would be obliged to repeat his opinion before the King and the judges, certainly would not have allowed himself to be carried away by mere compassion to so great a falsification of his judgment.

Or was he himself sharing the experience of many a fellow-artist?  How often the creator deceived himself concerning the value of his own work!  He had expected the greatest success from his Polyphemus hurling the rock at Odysseus escaping in the boat, and a gigantic smith had posed for a model.  Yet the judges had condemned it in the severest manner as a work far exceeding the bounds of moderation, and arousing positive dislike.  The clay figure had not been executed in stone or metal, and crumbled away.  The opposite would probably now happen with the Demeter.  Her bending attitude had seemed to him daring, nay, hazardous; but the acute critic Proclus had perceived that it was in accord with one of Daphne’s habits, and therefore numbered it among the excellences of the statue.

If the judges who awarded the prize agreed with the verdict of the grammateus, he must accustom himself to value his own work higher, perhaps even above that of Myrtilus.

But was this possible?

He saw his friend’s Demeter as though it was standing before him, and again he recognised in it the noblest masterpiece its maker had ever created.  What praise this marvellous work would have deserved if his own really merited such high encomiums!