The crisp morning air was as invigorating to Melissa as her cold bath had been, after a night which had brought her so little rest.  She felt as though she, and all Nature with her, had just crossed the threshold of a new day, bidding her to fresh life and labor.  Now and then a flame from Lucifer’s torch swallowed up a stretch of morning mist, while the Hours escorted Phoebus Apollo, whose radiant diadem of beams was just rising above the haze; Melissa could have declared she saw them dancing forth before him and strewing the path of the sun with flowers.  All this was beautiful—­as beautiful as the priest’s chant, the aromatic sweetness of the air, and the works of art in cast bronze or hewn marble which were to be seen on the bridge, on the temple to Isis and Anubis to the right of the street, under the colonnades of the handsomest houses, on the public fountains—­in short, wherever the eye might turn.  Her lover, borne before her in a litter, was on the way to the physician in whose hands lay the power to cure him.  She felt as though Hope led the way.

Since love had blossomed in her breast her quiet life had become an eventful one.  Most of what she had gone through had indeed filled her with alarms.  Serious questions to which she had never given a thought had been brought before her; and yet, in this brief period of anxiety she had gained the precious sense of youthfulness and of capacity for action when she had to depend on herself.  The last few hours had revealed to her the possession of powers which only yesterday she had never suspected.  She, who had willingly yielded to every caprice of her father’s, and who, for love of her brothers, had always unresistingly done their bidding, now knew that she had a will of her own and strength enough to assert it; and this, again, added to her contentment this morning.

Alexander had told her, and old Dido, and Diodoros, that she was fair to look upon—­but these all saw her with the eyes of affection; so she had always believed that she was a well-looking girl enough, but by no means highly gifted in any respect—­a girl whose future would be to bloom and fade unknown in her father’s service.  But now she knew that she was indeed beautiful; not only because she had heard it repeatedly in the crowd of yesterday, or even because Agatha had declared it while braiding her hair—­an inward voice affirmed it, and for her lover’s sake she was happy to believe it.

As a rule, she would have been ready to drop with fatigue after so many sleepless hours and such severe exertions; but to-day she felt as fresh as the birds in the trees by the roadside, which greeted the sun with cheerful twitterings.

“Yes, the world is indeed fair!” thought she; but at that very moment Andreas’s grave voice was heard ordering the bearers to turn down a dark side alley which led into the street of Hermes, a few hundred paces from the Rhakotis Canal.

How anxious the good man looked!  Her world was not the world of the Christian freedman; that she plainly understood when the litter in which Diodoros lay was carried into one of the houses in the side street.