If this man could do nothing, there was no help on earth.  And how dignified and self-possessed were the movements of this bent old man as he leaned on his staff!  He, a stranger here, seemed to be showing the others the way, a guide in his own realm.  Melissa had heard that the strong scent of the kyphi might prove injurious to Diodoros, and her one thought now was the desire that Galenus might soon approach his couch.  He did not, in fact, begin with the sick nearest to the door, but stood awhile in the middle of the hall, leaning against a column and surveying the place and the beds.

When his searching glance rested on that where Diodoros was lying, an answering look met his with reverent entreaty from a pair of beautiful, large, innocent eyes.  A smile parted his bearded lips, and going up to the girl he said:  “Where beauty bids, even age must obey.  Your lover, child, or your brother?”

“My betrothed,” Melissa hastened to reply; and the maidenly embarrassment which flushed her cheek became her so well that he added: 

“He must have much to recommend him if I allow him to carry you off, fair maid.”

With these words he went up to the couch, and looking at Diodoros as he lay, he murmured, as if speaking to himself and without paying any heed to the younger men who crowded round him: 

“There are no true Greeks left here; but the beauty of the ancestral race is not easily stamped out, and is still to be seen in their descendants.  What a head, what features, and what hair!”

Then he felt the lad’s breast, shoulders, and arms, exclaiming in honest admiration, “What a godlike form!”

He laid his delicate old hand, with its network of blue veins, on the sick man’s forehead, again glanced round the room, and listened to Ptolemaeus, who gave him a brief and technical report of the case; then, sniffing the heavy scent that filled the hall, he said, as the Christian leech ceased speaking: 

“We will try; but not here—­in a room less full of incense.  This perfume brings dreams, but no less surely induces fever.  Have you no other room at hand where the air is purer?”

An eager “Yes,” in many voices was the reply; and Diodoros was forthwith transferred into a small cubicle adjoining.

While he was being moved, Galenus went from bed to bed, questioning the chief physician and the patients.  He seemed to have forgotten Diodoros and Melissa; but after hastily glancing at some and carefully examining others, and giving advice where it was needful, he desired to see the fair Alexandrian’s lover once more.

As he entered the room he nodded kindly to the girl.  How gladly would she have followed him!  But she said to herself that if he had wished her to be present he would certainly have called her; so she modestly awaited his return.  She had to wait a long time, and the minutes seemed hours while she heard the voices of men through the closed door, the moaning and sighing of the sufferer, the splashing of water, and the clatter of metal instruments; and her lively imagination made her fancy that something almost unendurable was being done to her lover.