"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