ich, as an avenger, she must yet shed.

BOOK 2.

CHAPTER I.

While the market place in Tennis was filling, Archias's white house
had become a heap of smouldering ruins. Hundreds of men and women were
standing around the scene of the conflagration, but no one saw the
statue of Demeter, which had been removed from Hermon's studio just in
time. The nomarch had had it locked up in the neighbouring temple of the
goddess.

It was rumoured that the divinity had saved her own statue by a miracle;
Pamaut, the police officer, said that he had seen her himself as,
surrounded by a brilliant light, she soared upward on the smoke that
poured from the burning house. The strategist and the nomarch used
every means in their power to capture the robbers, but without the least
success.

As it had become known that Paseth, Gula's husband, had cast off his
wife because she had gone to Hermon's studio, the magistrates believed
that the attack had been made by the Biamites; yet Paseth was absent
from the city during the assault, and the innocence of the others could
also be proved.

Since, for two entire years, piracy had entirely ceased in this
neighbourhood, no one thought of corsairs, and the bodies of the
incendiaries having been consumed by the flames with the white house, it
could not be ascertained to what class the marauders belonged.

The blinded sculptor could only testify that one of the robbers was a
negro, or at any rate had had his face blackened, and that the size of
another had appeared to him almost superhuman. This circumstance gave
rise to the fable that, during the terrible storm of the previous clay,
Hades had opened and spirits of darkness had rushed into the studio of
the Greek betrayer.

The strategist, it is true, did not believe such tales, but the
superstition of the Biamites, who, moreover, aided the Greeks
reluctantly to punish a crime which threatened to involve their own
countrymen, put obstacles in the way of his measures.

Not until he heard of Ledscha's disappearance, and was informed by
the priest of Nemesis of the handsome sum which had been found in the
offering box of the temple shortly after the attack, did he arrive at
a conjecture not very far from the real state of affairs; only it
was still incomprehensible to him what body of men could have placed
themselves at the disposal of a girl's vengeful plan.

On the second day after the fire, the epistrategus of the whole Delta,
wh