chest, ordered him to
keep quiet.

The barbarian yielded as obediently as a child, but at first remained in
a sitting posture and asked, in scarcely intelligible broken Greek, how
he came to this place.

After Hermon had satisfied his curiosity, he also put a few questions,
and learned that his charge not only wore a mustache, like his fellow
countrymen, but also a full beard, because the latter was the badge of
the bridge builders, to which class he belonged. While examining the one
crossing the canal, it had fallen in upon him.

He closed his eyes as he spoke, and Hermon wondered if it was not time
for him to lie down also; but the wounded man's brow was still burning,
and the Gallic words which he constantly muttered were probably about the
phantoms of fever, which Hermon recognised from Lycon's illness.

So he resolved to wait and continue to devote the night, which he had
already intended to give him, to the sufferer. From the chair at the foot
of the bed he looked directly into his face. The soft light of the lamp,
which with two others hung from a tall, heavy bronze stand in the shape
of an anchor, which Bias had brought, shone brightly enough to allow him
to perceive how powerful was the man whose life he had saved. His own
face was scarcely lighter in hue than the barbarian's, and how sharp was
the contrast between his long, thick black beard and his white face and
bare arched chest!

Hermon had noticed this same contrast in his own person. Otherwise the
Gaul did not resemble him in a single feature, and he might even have
refused to compare his soft, wavy beard with the harsh, almost bristly
one of the barbarian. And what a defiant, almost evil expression his
countenance wore when--perhaps because his wound ached--he closed his
lips more firmly! The children who so willingly let him, Hermon, take
them in his arms would certainly have been afraid of this savage-looking
fellow.

Yet in build, and at any rate in height and breadth of shoulders, there
was some resemblance between him and the Gaul.

As a bridge builder, the injured man belonged, in a certain sense, to the
ranks of the artists, and this increased Hermon's interest in his
patient, who was now probably out of the most serious danger.

True, the Greek still cast many a searching glance at the barbarian, but
his eyes closed more and more frequently, and at last the idea took
possession of him that he himself was the wounded man on the couch, an