tanding behind several
rows of gazers who were between them and the portrait.

As the speaker ceased, the little crowd broke up, and when Melissa could
at last see her brother's work at her ease, she stood speechless for
some time; and then she turned to the artist, and exclaimed, from the
depths of her heart, "Beauty is perhaps the noblest thing in the world!"

"It is," replied Alexander, with perfect assurance. And he, bewitched
once more by the spell which had held him by Korinna's couch, gazed into
the dark eyes in his own picture, whose living glance his had never met,
and which he nevertheless had faithfully reproduced, giving them a look
of the longing of a pure soul for all that is lovely and worthy.

Melissa, an artist's daughter, as she looked at this portrait,
understood what it was that had so deeply stirred her brother while he
painted it; but this was not the place to tell him so. She soon tore
herself away, to look about for Philip once more and then to be taken
home.

Alexander, too, was seeking Philip; but, sharp as the artist's eyes
were, Melissa's seemed to be keener, for, just as they were giving it up
and turning to go, she pointed to a dark corner and said softly, "There
he is."

And there, in fact, her brother was, sitting with two men, one very tall
and the other a little man, his brow resting on his hand in the deep
shadow of a sarcophagus, between the wall and a mummy-case set on end,
which till now had hidden him from Alexander and Melissa.

Who could the man be who had kept the young philosopher, somewhat
inaccessible in his pride of learning, so long in talk in that half-dark
corner? He was not one of the learned society at the Museum; Alexander
knew them all. Besides, he was not dressed like them, in the Greek
fashion, but in the flowing robe of a Magian. And the stranger was a man
of consequence, for he wore his splendid garment with a superior air,
and as Alexander approached him he remembered having somewhere seen this
tall, bearded figure, with the powerful head garnished with flowing and
carefully oiled black curls. Such handsome and well-chiseled features,
such fine eyes, and such a lordly, waving beard were not easily
forgotten; his memory suddenly awoke and threw a light on the man as he
sat in the gloom, and on the surroundings in which he had met him for
the first time.

It was at the feast of Dionysus. Among a drunken crowd, which was
rushing wildly along the streets, and