“What are you doing?  By all the gods, you have chosen the wrong time for a quarrel!  Zminis is on the way hither to take you both prisoners; he will be here in a minute!  Fly into the kitchen, girl!  Dido will hide you in the wood-store behind the hearth.-You, Philip, must squeeze into the henhouse.  Only be quick, or it will be too late!”

“Go!” cried Melissa to her brother.  “Out through the kitchen window you can get into the poultry-yard!”

She threw herself weeping into his arms, kissed him, and added, hastily:  “Whatever happens to us, I shall risk all to save my father and Alexander.  Farewell!  The gods preserve us!”

She now seized Philip’s wrist, as he had before grasped hers, to drag him away; but he freed himself, saying, with an indifference which terrified her:  “Then let the worst come.  Ruin may take its course.  Death rather than dishonor!”

“Madman!” the slave could not help exclaiming; and the faithful fellow, though wont to obey, threw his arms round his master’s son to drag him away into the kitchen, while Philip pushed him off, saying: 

“I will not hide, like a frightened woman!”

But the Gaul heard the approach of marching men, so, paying no further heed to the brother, he dragged Melissa into the kitchen, where old Dido undertook to hide her.

Philip stood panting in the studio.  Through the open window he could see the pursuers coming nearer, and the instinct of self-preservation, which asserts itself even in the strongest, prompted him to follow the slave’s advice.  But before he could reach the door, in fancy he saw himself joining the party of philosophers airing themselves under the arcades in the great court of the Museum; he heard their laughter and their bitter jests at the skeptic, the independent thinker, who had sought refuge among the fowls, who had been hauled out of the hen-house; and this picture confirmed his determination to yield to force rather than bring on himself the curse of ridicule.  But at the same time other reasons for submitting to his fate suggested themselves unbidden—­reasons more worthy of his position, of the whole course and aim of his thoughts, and of the sorrow which weighed upon his soul.  It beseemed him as a skeptic to endure the worst with equanimity; under all circumstances he liked to be in the right, and he would fain have called out to his sister that the cruel powers whose enmity he had incurred still persisted in driving him on to despair and death, worthy as he was of a better fate.

A few minutes later Zminis came in, and put out his long lean arms to apprehend him in Caesar’s name.  Philip submitted, and not a muscle of his face moved.  Once, indeed, a smile lighted it up, as he reflected that they would hardly have carried him off to prison if Alexander were already in their power; but the smile gave way only too soon to gloomy gravity when Zminis informed him that his brother, the traitor, had just given himself up to the chief of the night-watch, and was now safe under lock and ward.  But his crime was so great that, according to the law of Egypt, his nearest relations were to be seized and punished with him.  Only his sister was now missing, but they would know how to find her.