carried to extremes; you condemn a brief necessary delay as breach of
faith and base treachery. This behaviour is unbearable."

"Then you will not come?" she asked apathetically, laying her hand
upon the door; but Hermon cried out in a tone half beseeching, half
imperious: "You must not go so! If you insist upon it, surely I will
come. There is no room in your obstinate soul for kind indulgence. No
one, by the dog, ever accused me of being specially skilled in this
smooth art; yet there may be duties and circumstances--"

Here Ledscha gently opened the door; but, seized with a fear of losing
this rare creature, whose singular beauty attracted him powerfully,
even now, this peerless model for a work on which he placed the highest
hopes, he strode swiftly to her side, and drawing her back from the
threshold, exclaimed: "Difficult as it is for me on this special day, I
will come, only you must not demand what is impossible. The right course
often lies midway. Half the night must belong to the banquet with my old
friends and Daphne; the second half--"

"To the barbarian, you think--the spider," she gasped hoarsely. "But my
welfare as well as yours depends on the decision. Stay here, or come to
the island--you have your choice."

Wrenching herself from his hold as she spoke, she slipped through the
doorway and left the room.

Hermon, with a muttered oath, stood still, shrugging his shoulders
angrily.

He could do nothing but yield to this obstinate creature's will.

In the atrium Ledscha met the slave Bias, and returned his greeting only
by a wave of the hand; but before opening the side door which was
to lead her into the open air, she paused, and asked bluntly in the
language of their people: "Was Arachne--I don't mean the spider, but the
weaver whom the Greeks call by that name--a woman like the rest of us?
Yet it is said that she remained victor in a contest with the goddess
Athene."

"That is perfectly true," answered Bias, "but she had to atone cruelly
for this triumph; the goddess struck her on the forehead with the
weaver's shuttle, and when, in her shame and rage, she tried to hang
herself, she was transformed into the spider."

Ledscha stood still, and, while drawing the veil over her pallid face,
asked with quivering lips, "And is there no other Arachne?"

"Not among mortals," was the reply, "but even here in this house there
are more than enough of the disagreeable, creeping creatures which bear
the