“I often ask myself what he still finds in me,” she said.  “True, so long a period of wedded life is a firm tie.  If I am gone and he does not find me when he returns home from inspections, he wanders about as if lost, and does not even relish his food, though the same cook has prepared it for years.  And he, who forgets nothing and knows by name a large number of the many thousand men he commands, would very probably, when I am away, join the troops with only sandals on his feet.  To miss my ugly old face really can not be so difficult!  When he wooed me, of course I looked very different.  And so—­he confessed it himself—­so he always sees me, and most plainly when I am absent from his sight.  But that, Hermon, will be your good fortune also.  All you now know as young and beautiful will continue so to you as long as this sorrowful blindness lasts, and on that very account you must not remain alone, my boy—­that is, if your heart has already decided in favour of any one—­and that is the case, unless these old eyes deceive me.”

“Daphne,” he answered dejectedly, “why should I deny that she is dear to me?  And yet, how dare the blind man take upon himself the sin of binding her young life—­”

“Stop! stop!” Thyone interrupted with eager warmth.  “She loves you, and to be everything to you is the greatest happiness she can imagine.”

“Until repentance awakes, and it is too late,” he answered gravely.  “But even were her love strong enough to share her husband’s misfortune patiently—­nay, perhaps with joyous courage—­it would still be contemptible baseness were I to profit by that love and seek her hand.”

“Hermon!” the matron now exclaimed reproachfully; but he repeated with strong emphasis:  “Yes, it would be baseness so great that even her most ardent love could not save me from the reproach of having committed it.  I will not speak of her father, to whom I am so greatly indebted.  It may be that it might satisfy Daphne, full of kindness as she is, to devote herself, body and soul, to the service of her helpless companion.  But I?  Far from thinking constantly, like her, solely of others and their welfare, I should only too often, selfish as I now am, be mindful of myself.  But when I realize who I am, I see before me a blind man who is poorer than a beggar, because the scorching flames melted even the gold which was to help him pay his debts.”

“Folly!” cried the matron.  “For what did Archias gather his boundless treasures?  And when his daughter is once yours—­”

“Then,” Hermon went on bitterly, “the blinded artist’s poverty will be over.  That is your opinion, and the majority of people will share it.  But I have my peculiarities, and the thought of being rescued from hunger and thirst by the woman I love, and who ought to see in me the man from whom she receives the best gifts—­to be dependent on her as the recipient of her alms—­seems to me worse than if I were once more to lose my sight.