ool that he was!--and it might not be she after
all!

He made some sudden movement. She looked down, saw him, and shutting
the blind, vanished for the night. In vain, now that the temptation had
departed, he sat and waited for its reappearance, half cursing himself
for having broken the spell. But the chamber was dark and silent
henceforth; and Philammon, wearied out, found himself soon wandering
back to the Laura in quiet dreams, beneath the balmy, semi-tropic night.

CHAPTER X: THE INTERVIEW

Philammon was aroused from his slumbers at sunrise the next morning by
the attendants who came in to sweep out the lecture-rooms, and wandered,
disconsolately enough, up and down the street; longing for, and yet
dreading, the three weary hours to be over which must pass before he
would be admitted to Hypatia. But he had tasted no food since noon the
day before: he had but three hours' sleep the previous night, and
had been working, running, and fighting for two whole days without a
moment's peace of body or mind. Sick with hunger and fatigue, and aching
from head to foot with his hard night's rest on the granite-flags, he
felt as unable as man could well do to collect his thoughts or brace his
nerves for the coming interview. How to get food he could not guess; but
having two hands, he might at least earn a coin by carrying a load; so
he went down to the Esplanade in search of work. Of that, alas! there
was none. So he sat down upon the parapet of the quay, and watched the
shoals of sardines which played in and out over the marble steps below,
and wondered at the strange crabs and sea-locusts which crawled up and
down the face of the masonry, a few feet below the surface, scrambling
for bits of offal, and making occasional fruitless dashes at the nimble
little silver arrows which played round them. And at last his whole
soul, too tired to think of anything else, became absorbed in a mighty
struggle between two great crabs, who held on stoutly, each by a claw,
to his respective bunch of seaweed, while with the others they tugged,
one at the head and the other at the tail of a dead fish. Which would
conquer?.... Ay, which? And for five minutes Philammon was alone in the
world with the two struggling heroes.... Might not they be emblematic?
Might not the upper one typify Cyril?--the lower one Hypatia?--and the
dead fish between, himself?.... But at last the deadlock was suddenly
ended--the fish parted in the middle; and the