Here Castor laughed aloud, and rolled the white robe into a bundle.  Alexander peeped out of his nook and shook his head in amazement, for the supple youth, who a moment before stood stalwart and upright, had assumed, with a bent attitude and a long, white beard hastily placed on his chin, the aspect of a weary, poor old man.

“I will give you a lesson!” muttered Alexander to himself, and he shook his fist at the intriguing rascal as he vanished into the house with the false deaconess.

So Serapion was a cheat!  And the supposed ghost of Korinna was a Christian maiden who was being shamefully deluded.  But he would keep watch over her, and bring that laughing villain to account.  The first aim of his life was not to lose sight of Agatha.  His whole happiness, he felt, depended on that.  The gods had, as it were, raised her from the dead for him; in her, everything that he most admired was united; she was the embodiment of everything he cared for and prized; every feeling sank into the shade beside the one desire to make her his.  She was, at this moment, the universe to him; and all else—­the pursuers at his heels, his father, his sister, pretty Ino, to whom he had vowed his love only the night before—­had ceased to exist for him.

Possessed wholly by the thought of her, he never took his eyes off the door opposite; and when at last the maiden came out with the deaconess, whom she called Elizabeth, and with Castor, Alexander followed the ill-matched trio; and he had to be brisk, for at first they hurried through the streets as though they feared to be overtaken.  He carefully kept close to the houses on the shady side, and when they presently stopped, so did he.

The deaconess inquired of Agatha whither she would be taken.  But when the girl replied that she must go back to her own boat, waiting at the ferry, and return home, the deaconess represented that this was impossible by reason of the drunken seamen, who at this hour made the strand unsafe; she could only advise Agatha to come home with her and remain till daybreak.  “This kind old man,” and she pointed to Castor, “would no doubt go and tell the oarsmen that they were not to be uneasy at her absence.”

The two women stood talking in the broad moonlight, and the pale beams fell on Agatha’s beautiful unveiled features, giving them that unearthly, corpse-like whiteness which Alexander had tried to represent in his picture of Korinna.  Again the thought that she was risen from the dead sent a chill through his blood—­that she would make him follow her, perhaps to the tomb she had quitted.  He cared not!  If his senses had cheated him—­if,—­in spite of what he had heard, that pale, unspeakably lovely image were indeed a lamia, a goblin shape from Hecate’s dark abode, yet would he follow wherever she might lead, as to a festival, only to be with her.

Agatha thanked the deaconess, and as she spoke raised her eyes to the woman’s face; and they were two large, dark orbs sparkling through tears, and as unlike as possible to the eyes which a ghost might snatch from their sockets to fling like balls or stones in the face of a pursuer.  Oh, if only those eyes might look into his own as warmly and gratefully as they now gazed into the face of that treacherous woman!