Should she abandon him?  She must go on, and to seek protection in the outer wall of the temple meant turning back.  So she stood still and held her breath as she watched the advancing lights.  Now they stopped.  She heard the rattle of arms and men’s voices.  The lantern-bearers were being detained by the watch.  They were the first soldiers she had seen, the others being engaged in drinking, or in the work on the race-course.  Would the soldiers find her, too?  But, no!  They moved on, the torch-bearers in front, toward the street of Hermes.

Who were those people who went wandering about among the slain, turning first to this side and then to that, as if searching for something?

They could not be robbing the dead, or the watch would have seized them.

Now they came quite close to her, and she trembled with fright, for one of them was a soldier.  The light of the lantern shone upon his armor.  He went before a man and two lads who were following a laden ass, and in one of them Melissa recognized with beating heart a garden slave of Polybius, who had often done her a service.

And now she took courage to look more closely at the man—­and it was—­yes, even in the peasant’s clothes he wore he could not deceive her quick eyes—­it was Andreas!

She felt that every breath that came from her young bosom must be a prayer of thanksgiving; nor was it long before the freedman recognized Melissa in the light-footed black boy who seemed to spring from the earth in order to show them the way, and he, too, felt as if a miracle had been wrought.

Like fair flowers that spring up round a scaffold over which the hungry ravens croak and hover, so here, in the midst of death and horror, joy and hope began to blossom in thankful hearts.  Diodoros lived!  No word-only a fleeting pressure of the hand and a quick look passed between the elderly man and the maiden—­who looked like a boy scarcely passed his school-days—­to show what they felt as they knelt beside the wounded youth and bound up the deep gash in his shoulder dealt by the sword that had felled him.

A little while afterward, Andreas drew from the basket which the ass carried, and from which he had already taken bandages and medicine, a light litter of matting.  He then lifted Melissa on to the back of the beast of burden, and they all moved onward.

The sights that surrounded them as long as they were near the Serapeum forced her to close her eyes, especially when the ass had to walk round some obstruction, or when it and its guide waded through slimy pools.  She could not forget that they were red, nor whence they came; and this ride brought her moments in which she thought to expire of shuddering horror and sorrow and wrath.

Not till they reached a quiet lane in Rhakotis, where they could advance without let or hindrance, did she open her eyes.  But a strange, heavy pain oppressed her that she had never felt before, and her head burned so that she could scarcely see Andreas and the two slaves, who, strong in the joy of knowing that their young lord was alive, carried Diodoros steadily along in the litter.  The soldier—­it was the centurion Martialis, who had been banished to the Pontus—­still accompanied them, but Melissa’s aching head pained her so much that she did not think of asking who he was or why he was with them.