with his hands resting on the hilt of
his drawn sword. Below her lay all the splendor of Syracuse, the island
town, the smiling bay where the Athenian galleys had been snared more
than fifteen hundred years before, the quarries where the flower of
Athenian chivalry had died its dreadful death, the sapphire sea that
sang its secrets to Theocritus. In all Sicily there was no lovelier
spot, no fairer prospect. But the girl was more beautiful than the place
whereon she stood or the sights on which she gazed.

If the spirit of Theocritus, coming from the fields where Virgil
lingered unaware of Dante, could have revisited his much-loved Syracuse,
the poet of Berenice would have found that the island of Aphrodite still
bore women worthy of the goddess. The girl was tall and straight and
slim; health and youth gave their warm color to her cheeks; the old
Greek beauty reigned in her face, but her blue eyes shone with the
brightness of Oriental stars. Her red hair, wine red, blood red, framed
her face with amazing color. Something of the composition of the
woodland entered into the hues of the garments she wore, the simple
garments of a country girl, but shaped of stuffs that were dyed warm
reds and browns, the red of forest fires, the brown of forest trees. It
seemed as if the child, conscious of the strange loveliness of her red
hair, sought to harmonize her very habit to its fierce assertion. Yet
there was no fierceness in the face that the red hair crowned so
radiantly. If it carried the Grecian beauty, it carried also the Grecian
calm, the noble repose of the Grecian image that once had stood in the
splendid temple whose ruined pillars now girdled ironically the ruined
Moslem mosque. Two civilizations had withered in Sicily to afford a
shelter for Perpetua, the daughter of Theron, the executioner of
Syracuse.

Perpetua, daughter of Theron the executioner of Syracuse, waiting for
the coming of Theron the executioner, looked with calm eyes upon
Syracuse, upon the distant city of which she knew no more in all her
eighteen years of life than that same distant vision, a jewel city lying
in orchards at her feet. She had no desire to know more of it; her
father wished that she should know no more of it, and she was content,
for Theron the executioner was the wisest man in the world, wiser than
the few priests who tended the chapel on the hill, wiser than the few
country folk who sometimes climbed to those heights and seemed to fe