“No, no,” the matron declared, kissing her brow and eyes.  “If he loves you truly, he will trust you.”

“He loves me,” sobbed Melissa; “but, even if he does not desert me when I am thus branded, his father will come between us.”

“God forbid!” cried Euryale.  “Remain what you are, and I will always be the same to you, come what may; and those who love you will not refuse to listen to an old woman who has grown gray in honor.”

And Melissa believed her motherly, kind, worthy friend; and, with the new confidence which revived in her, her longing for her lover began to stir irresistibly.  She wanted a fond glance from the eyes of the youth who loved her, and to whom, for another man’s sake, she could not give all his due, nay, who had perhaps a right to complain of her.  This she frankly confessed, and the matron herself conducted the impatient girl to see Diodoros.

Melissa again found Andreas in attendance on the sufferer, and she was surprised at the warmth with which the high-priest’s wife greeted the Christian.

Diodoros was already able to be dressed and to sit up.  He was pale and weak, and his head was still bound up, but he welcomed the girl affectionately, though with a mild reproach as to the rarity of her visits.

Andreas had already informed him that Melissa was kept away by her mediation for the prisoners, and so he was comforted by her assurance that if her duty would allow of it she would never leave him again.  And the joy of having her there, the delight of gazing into her sweet, lovely face, and the youthful gift of forgetting the past in favor of the present, silenced every bitter reflection.  He was soon blissfully listening to her with a fresh color in his cheeks, and never had he seen her so tender, so devoted, so anxious to show him the fullness of her great love.  The quiet, reserved girl was to-day the wooer, and with the zeal called forth by her ardent wish to do him good, she expressed all the tenderness of her warm heart so frankly and gladly that to him it seemed as though Eros had never till now pierced her with the right shaft.

As soon as Euryale was absorbed in conversation with Andreas, she offered him her lips with gay audacity, as though in defiance of some stern dragon of virtue, and he, drunk with rapture, enjoyed what she granted him.  And soon it was he who became daring, declaring that there would be time enough to talk another day; that for the present her rosy mouth had nothing to do but to cure him with kisses.  And during this sweet give and take, she implored him with pathetic fervor never, never to doubt her love, whatever he might hear of her.  Their older friends, who had turned their backs on the couple and were talking busily by a window, paid no heed to them, and the blissful conviction of being loved as ardently as she loved flooded her whole being.

Only now and then did the thought of Caesar trouble for a moment the rapture of that hour, like a hideous form appearing out of distant clouds.  She felt prompted indeed to tell her lover everything, but it seemed so difficult to make him understand exactly how everything had happened, and Diodoros must not be distressed.  And, indeed, intoxicated as he was with heated passion, he made the attempt impossible.