Hermon’s blindness, it was to be hoped, would be cured.

Duty, and perhaps also interest, commanded him to show him frankly how highly he estimated his art and his last work.

After the arrival of Thyone and Daphne, Hermon had consented to accompany them on board the Proserpina, their spacious galley.  True, he had yielded reluctantly to this arrangement of his parents’ old friend, and neither she nor Daphne had hitherto succeeded in soothing the fierce resentment against fate which filled his soul after the loss of his sight and his dearest friend.  As yet every attempt to induce him to bear his terrible misfortune with even a certain degree of composure had failed.

The Tennis leech, trained by the Egyptian priests at Sais in the art of healing, who was attached as a pastophorus to the Temple of Isis, in the city of weavers, had covered the artist’s scorched face with bandages, and earnestly adjured him never in his absence to raise them, and to keep every ray of light from his blinded eyes.  But the agitation which had mastered Hermon’s whole being was so great that, in spite of the woman’s protestations, he lifted the covering again and again to see whether he could not perceive once more at least a glimmer of the sunlight whose warming power he felt.  The thought of living in darkness until the end of his life seemed unendurable, especially as now all the horrors which, hitherto, had only visited him in times of trial during the night assailed him with never-ceasing cruelty.

The image of the spider often forced itself upon him, and he fancied that the busy insect was spreading its quickly made web over his blinded eyes, which he was not to touch, yet over which he passed his hand to free them from the repulsive veil.

The myth related that because Athene’s blow had struck the ambitious weaver Arachne, she had resolved, before the goddess transformed her into a spider, to put an end to her disgrace.

How infinitely harder was the one dealt to him!  How much better reason he had to use the privilege in which man possesses an advantage over the immortals, of putting himself to death with his own hand when he deems the fitting time has come!  What should he, the artist, to whom his eyes brought whatever made life valuable, do longer in this hideous black night, brightened by no sunbeam?

He was often overwhelmed, too, by the remembrance of the terrible end of the friend in whom he saw the only person who might have given him consolation in this distress, and the painful thought of his poverty.

He was supported solely by what his art brought and his wealthy uncle allowed him.  The Demeter which Archias had ordered had been partially paid for in advance, and he had intended to use the gold—­a considerable sum—­to pay debts in Alexandria.  But it was consumed with the rest of his property—­tools, clothing, mementoes of his dead parents, and a few books which contained his favourite poems and the writings of his master, Straton.