“And so,” interrupted the philosopher, “you thought it praiseworthy and pleasing to the gods that you should be the first and only one to offer sacrifice for him, in secret, and of your own free will?  That was how it came about?  Well, child, you need not be ashamed of it.”

But then suddenly his face clouded, and he asked, in a grave and altered voice: 

“Are you a Christian?”

“No,” she replied, firmly.  “We are Greeks.  How could I have offered a sacrifice of blood to Asklepios if I had believed in the crucified god?”

“Then,” said Philostratus, and his eyes flashed brightly, “I may promise you, in the name of the gods, that your prayer and offering were pleasing in their eyes.  I myself, noble girl, owe you a rare pleasure.  But, tell me—­how did you feel as you left the sanctuary?”

“Light-hearted, my lord, and content,” she answered, with a frank, glad look in her fine eyes.  “I could have sung as I went down the road, though there were people about.”

“I should have liked to hear you,” he said, kindly, and he still held her hand, which he had grasped with the amiable geniality that characterized him, when they were joined by the senator and his sister-in-law.

“Has she won your good offices?” asked Coeranus; and Philostratus replied, quickly, “Anything that it lies in my power to do for her shall certainly be done.”

Berenike bade them both to join her in her own rooms, for everything that had to do with the banquet was odious to her; and as they went, Melissa told her new friend her brother’s story.  She ended it in the quiet sitting-room of the mistress of the house, an artistic but not splendid apartment, adorned only with the choicest works of early Alexandrian art.  Philostratus listened attentively, but, before she could put her petition for help into words, he exclaimed: 

“Then what we have to do is, to move Caesar to mercy, and that—­Child, you know not what you ask!”

They were interrupted by a message from Seleukus, desiring Coeranus to join the other guests, and as soon as he had left them Berenike withdrew to take off the splendor she hated.  She promised to return immediately and join their discussion, and Philostratus sat for a while lost in thought.  Then he turned to Melissa and asked her: 

“Would you for their sakes be able to make up your mind to face bitter humiliation, nay, perhaps imminent danger?”

“Anything!  I would give my life for them!” replied the girl, with spirit, and her eyes gleamed with such enthusiastic self-sacrifice that his heart, though no longer young, warmed under their glow, and the principle to which he had sternly adhered since he had been near the imperial person, never to address a word to the sovereign but in reply, was blown to the winds.

Holding her hand in his, with a keen look into her eyes, he went on: 

“And if you were required to do a thing from which many a man even would recoil—­you would venture?”