is, who for
so long a time seemed to have suspended her persecution, but since he
had returned from the abode of the oracle was again asserting the old
right to him. During many a sleepless hour of the night he had once more
heard the rolling of her terrible wheel.

Even before the journey to the oasis of Amon, everything life could
offer him, the idle rake, in his perpetual darkness, had seemed shallow
and scarcely worth stretching out his hand for it.

True, an interesting conversation still had power to charm him, but
often during its continuance the full consciousness of his misfortune
forced itself upon his mind; for the majority of the subjects discussed
by the artists came to them through the medium of sight, and referred
to new creations of architecture, sculpture, and painting, from whose
enjoyment his blindness debarred him.

When returning home from a banquet, if his way lay through the city,
he was reminded of the superb buildings, marble terraces and fountains,
statues and porticoes, which had formerly satiated his eyes with
delight, and must now be illumined with a brilliant radiance by the
morning sunbeams, though a hostile fate shut them out from his eyes,
starving and thirsting for beautiful forms.

But it had seemed to him still harder to bear that his blinded eyes
refused to show him the most beautiful of all beautiful things, the
human form, when he lingered among the Ephebi or the spectators of
a festal procession, or visited the gymnasium, the theatre, the
Aphrodisium, or the Paneum gardens, where the beautiful women met at
sunset.

The Queen was to appear immediately, and when she took her place near
him his blindness would again deprive him of the sight of her delicately
cut features, prevent his returning the glances from her sparkling eyes,
and admiring the noble outlines of her thinly veiled figure.

Would his troubled spirit at least permit him to enjoy and enter without
restraint into the play of her quick wit?

Perhaps her arrival would relieve him from the discomfort which
oppressed him here.

A stranger, out of his own sphere, he felt chilled among these closely
united men and women, to whom no tie bound him save the presence of the
same host.

He was not acquainted with a single individual except the mythograph
Crates, who for several months had been one of the members of the
Museum, and who had attached himself to Hermon at Straton's lectures.

The artist was surprised to f