With drooping head Euryale re-entered the room, and gazed with kind, anxious eyes into the girl’s face, as if asking her forgiveness.  Following the impulse of her candid heart, Melissa threw her fair young arms round the aged lady, and, to her great surprise, after kissing her warmly on brow and mouth and eyes, cried in tones of tender entreaty: 

“Forgive me.  I did not want to listen, and yet I could not choose but hear.  No word of your discourse escaped me.  I know now that I must not fly, and that I must bear whatever fate the gods may send me.  I used often to say to myself, ’Of how little importance is my life or my happiness!’ And now that I must give up my lover, come what may I care not what the future has in store for me.  I can never forget Diodoros; and, when I think that everything is at an end between us, it is as if my heart were torn in pieces.  But I have found out, in these last days, what heavy troubles one may bear without breaking down.  If my flight is to bring danger, if not death and ruin, upon so many good people, I had better stay.  The man who lusts after me—­it is true, when I think of his embrace my blood runs cold!  But perhaps I shall be able to endure even that.  And then—­if I crush my heart into silence, and renounce Diodoros forever, and give myself up to Caesar—­as I must—­tell me you will not then close your doors against me, but that I may stay with you till the horrid hour comes when Caracalla calls me?”

The matron had listened with deep emotion to Melissa’s victory over her desires and her aversions.  This heathen maiden, brought up in the right way by a good mother, and to whom life had taught many a hard lesson, was she not already treading in the footsteps of the Saviour?  This child was offering up the great and pure love of her heart to preserve others from sorrow and danger; and what a different course of action was she herself to pursue in obedience to her husband’s orders—­her husband, whose duty it was to offer a shining example to the whole heathen world!

She thought of Abraham’s sacrifice, and wondered if the Lord might not perhaps be satisfied with Melissa’s willingness to lay her love upon the altar.  In any case, whatever she, Euryale, could do to save her from the worst fate that could befall a woman, that should be done, and this time it was she who drew the other toward her and kissed her.

Her heart was full to overflowing, and yet she did not forget to warn Melissa to be careful, when she was about to lay her head with its artificially arranged curls upon the lady’s breast.

“No, no,” she said, tenderly warding off the maiden’s embrace.  Then, laying her hands on the girl’s shoulders, she looked her straight in the face, and continued:  “Here you will ever find a resting-place.  When your hair lies smoothly round your sweet face, as it did yesterday, then lay it on my breast as often as you will.  Aye, and it can and shall be here in the