.

Eager for new pleasure, he drew a long breath as he went out into the
open air, pressed his hands upon his broad chest, and with his eyes
fixed upon the commandant of Pelusium's galley, bedecked with flags,
walked swiftly toward the landing place.

Suddenly from the deck, shaded by an awning, the loud laugh of a woman's
shrill voice reached his ear, blended with the deeper tones of
the grammateus, whose attacks on the previous night Hermon had not
forgotten.

He stopped as if the laugh had pierced him to the heart. Proclus
appeared to be on the most familiar terms with Althea, and to meet
him with the Thracian now seemed impossible. He longed for mirth and
pleasure, but was unwilling to share it with these two. As he dared not
disturb Myrtilus, there was only one place where he could find what he
needed, and this was--he had said so to himself when he turned his back
on his sleeping friend--in Daphne's society.

Only yesterday he would have sought her without a second thought, but
to-day Althea's declaration that he was the only man whom the daughter
of Archias loved stood between him and his friend.

He knew that from childhood she had watched his every step with sisterly
affection. A hundred times she had proved her loyalty; yet, dear as she
was to him, willingly as he would have risked his life to save her from
a danger, it had never entered his mind to give the tie that united them
the name of love.

An older relative of both in Alexandria had once advised him, when
he was complaining of his poverty, to seek her hand, but his pride of
manhood rebelled against having the wealth which fate denied flung into
his lap by a woman. When she looked at him with her honest eyes, he
could never have brought himself to feign anything, least of all a
passion of which, tenderly attached to her though he had been for years,
hitherto he had known nothing.

"Do you love her?" Hermon asked himself as he walked toward Daphne's
tent, and the anticipated "No" had pressed itself upon him far less
quickly than he expected.

One thing was undeniably certain: whoever won her for a wife--even
though she were the poorest of the poor--must be numbered among the most
enviable of men. And should he not recognise in his aversion to every
one of her suitors, and now to the aristocratic young Philotas, a
feeling which resembled jealousy?

No! He did not and would not love Daphne. If she were really his, and
whatever concerned him had