And till now he had never thought of her but as a child; but to-day he must look at her with different eyes—­her own father had enjoined it.  And in fact he gazed at her as though he beheld a miracle.

What had come over little Pulcheria?—­How was it that he had never noticed it before?—­It was a well-grown maiden that he saw, moving round, snowwhite arms; and he could have sworn that she had only thin, childish arms, for she had thrown them round his neck many a time when she had ridden up and down the garden on his back, calling him her fine horse.

How long ago was that?  Ten years!  She was now seventeen!

And how slender, and delicate, and white her hands were—­those hands for which her mother had often scolded her when, after building castles of sand, she had sat down to table unwashed.

Now she was laying the grapes round the pomegranates, and he remembered how Horapollo, only yesterday, had praised her dainty skill.

The windows were well screened, but a few sunbeams forced their way into the room and fell on her red-gold hair.  Even the fair Boeotians, whom he had admired in his student-days at Athens, had no such glorious crown of hair.  That she had a sweet and pretty face he had always known; but now, as she raised her eyes and first observed him, meeting his gaze with maidenly embarrassment and sweet surprise, and yet with perfect welcome, he felt himself color and he had to pause a moment to collect himself before he could respond with something more than an ordinary greeting to hers.  The dialogue that flashed through his mind in that instant began with sentences full of meaning.  But all he said was: 

“Yes, here I am,” which really did not deserve the hearty reply: 

“Thank God for that!” nor the bewitching embarrassment of the explanation that ensued:  “on my mother’s account.”

Again he blushed; he, the man who had long since forgotten his youthful shyness.  He asked after Dame Joanna, and how she was bearing her trouble, and then he said gravely:  “I was the bearer of bad news yesterday, and to-day again I have come like a bird of ill-omen.”

“You?” she said with a smile, and the simple word conveyed so sweet a doubt of his capacity for bringing evil that he could not help saying to himself that his friend, in leaving this child, this girl, to his care, had bequeathed to him the best gift that one mortal can devise to another:  a dear, trustful, innocent daughter—­or no, a younger sister—­as pure, as engaging, and as lovable as only the child of such parents could be.

While he stood telling her of what had happened at the governor’s house, he noted how deeply, for Paula’s and Mary’s sake, she took to heart the widow’s death, though Neforis had been nothing to her; and he decided that he would at once make Pulcheria’s mother acquainted with her dead husband’s wishes.