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,
gentle, and attractive.

Alexander never took his gaze off Agatha, and his artist-eye reveled in
her elastic step and her slender, shapely form. Above all, he was
bewitched by the way her head was set, with a little forward bend; and as
long as the way led through the silent lanes he was never weary of
comparing her with lovely images-with a poppy, whose flower bows the
stem; with a willow, whose head leans over the water; with the huntress
Artemis, who, chasing in the moonlight, bends to mark the game.

Thus, unwearied and unseen, he had followed them as far as the street of
Hermes; there his task became more difficult, for the road was swarming
with people