o 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!

He had a hard struggle with himself to subdue the impulse to put an
end, now and here, to the fiendish tricks which guile was playing on the
purest innocence; but the street was deserted, and if he had to struggle
with the bent old man, whose powerful and supple limbs he had already
seen, and if the villain should plant a knife in his ribs--for as
a wrestler he felt himself his match--Agatha would be bereft of a
protector and wholly in the deceiver's power.

This, at any rate, must not be, and he even controlled himself when
he heard the music of her words, and saw her grasp the hand of the
pretended graybeard, who, with an assumption of paternal kindness, dared
to kiss her hair, and then helped her to draw her kerchief over her
face. The street of Hermes, he explained, where the deaconess dwelt,
was full of people, and the divine gift of beauty, wherewith Heaven had
blessed her, would attract the baser kind, as a flame attracts bats and
moths. The hypocrite's voice was full of unction; the deaconess spoke
with pious gravity. He could see that she was a woman of middle age, and
he asked himself with rising fury whether the gods were not guilty who
had lent mean wretches like these such winning graces as to enable
them to lay traps for the guileless? For, in fact, the woman's face was
well-favored