Soon after dinner she had gone, accompanied by the lady Berenike, who had found her at the chief priest’s house, to visit her lover in the sick-rooms of the Serapeum.  Thankful and happy, she had found him with fully recovered consciousness, but the physician and the freedman Andreas, whom she met at the door of the chamber, had impressed on her the importance of avoiding all excitement.  So it had not been possible for her to tell him what had happened to her people, or of the perilous step she had taken in order to save them.  But Diodoros had talked of their wedding, and Andreas could confirm the fact that Polybius wished to see it celebrated as soon as possible.

Several pleasant subjects were discussed; but between whiles Melissa had to dissemble and give evasive answers to Diodoros’s questions as to whether she had already arranged with her brother and friends who should be the youths and maidens to form the wedding procession, and sing the hymeneal song.

As the two whispered to one another and looked tenderly at each other—­ for Diodoros had insisted on her allowing him to kiss not only her hands but also her sweet red lips—­Berenike had pictured her dead daughter in Melissa’s place.  What a couple they would have been!  How proudly and gladly she would have led them to the lovely villa at Kanopus, which her husband and she had rebuilt and decorated with the idea that some day Korinna, her husband, and—­if the gods should grant it—­their children, might inhabit it!  But even Melissa and Diodoros made a fine couple, and she tried with all her heart not to grudge her all the happiness that she had wished for her own child.

When it was time to depart, she joined the hands of the betrothed pair, and called down a blessing from the gods.

Diodoros accepted this gratefully.

He only knew that this majestic lady had made Melissa’s acquaintance through Alexander, and had won her affection, and he encouraged the impression that this woman, whose Juno-like beauty haunted him, had visited him on his bed of sickness in the place of his long-lost mother.

Outside the sick-room Andreas again met Melissa, and, after she had told him of her visit to the emperor, he impressed on her eagerly on no account to obey the tyrant’s call again.  Then he had promised to hide her securely, either on Zeno’s estate or else in the house of another friend, which was difficult of access.  When Dame Berenike had again, and with particular eagerness, suggested her ship, Andreas had exclaimed: 

“In the garden, on the ship, under the earth—­only not back to Caesar!”

The last question of the freedman’s, as to whether she had meditated further on his discourse, had reminded her of the sentence, “The fullness of the time is come”; and afterward the thought occurred to her, again and again, that in the course of the next few hours some decisive event would happen to her, “fulfilling the time,” as Andreas expressed it.