If Hermon could have seen her with her fluttering hair, dishevelled by the night breeze, and checks blanched by excitement and terror, if he had been told how she struggled with Thyone, who tried to detain her and lock her up before she left her father’s house, he would have perceived with still prouder joy, had that been possible, what he possessed in the devoted love of this true woman.

Grateful and moved by joyous hopes, he informed Daphne of the words of the oracle, which had imprinted themselves upon his memory.

She, too, quickly retained them, and murmured softly: 

“Noise and dazzling radiance are hostile to the purer light, Morning and day will rise quietly from the starving sand.”

What could the verse mean except that the blind man would regain the power to behold the light of clay amid the sands of the silent desert?

Perhaps it would be well for him to leave Alexandria now, and she described how much benefit she had received while hunting from the silence of the wilderness, when she had left the noise of the city behind her.  But before she had quite finished, the knocking at the door was repeated.

The lovers took leave of each other with one last kiss, and the final words of the departing girl echoed consolingly in the blind man’s heart, “The more they take from you, the more closely I will cling to you.”

Hermon spent the latter portion of the night rejoicing in the consciousness of a great happiness, yet also troubled by the difficult task which he could not escape.

When the market place was filling, gray-haired Philippus visited him.

He desired before the examination, for which every preparation had been made, to understand personally the relation of his dead comrade’s son to the defeated conspiracy, and he soon perceived that Hermon’s presence at the banquet was due solely to an unlucky accident or in consequence of the Queen’s desire to win him over to her plot.

Yet he was forced to advise the blind sculptor to leave Alexandria.  The suspicion that he had been associated with the conspirators was the more difficult to refute, because his Uncle Archias had imprudently allowed himself to be persuaded by Proclus and Arsinoe to lend the Queen large sums, which had undoubtedly been used to promote her abominable plans.

Philippus also informed him that he had just come from Archias, whom he had earnestly urged to fly as quickly as possible from the persecution which was inevitable; for, secure as Hermon’s uncle felt in his innocence, the receipts for the large sums loaned by him, which had just been found in Proclus’s possession, would bear witness against him.  Envy and ill will would also have a share in this affair, and the usually benevolent King knew no mercy where crime against his own person was concerned.  So Archias intended to leave the city on one of his own ships that very day.  Daphne, of course, would accompany him.