e, hastened to the King's palace.

If Hermon could have seen her with her fluttering hair, dishevelled by
the night breeze, and checks blanched by excitement and terror, if he
had been told how she struggled with Thyone, who tried to detain her and
lock her up before she left her father's house, he would have perceived
with still prouder joy, had that been possible, what he possessed in the
devoted love of this true woman.

Grateful and moved by joyous hopes, he informed Daphne of the words of
the oracle, which had imprinted themselves upon his memory.

She, too, quickly retained them, and murmured softly:

"Noise and dazzling radiance are hostile to the purer light, Morning and
day will rise quietly from the starving sand."

What could the verse mean except that the blind man would regain the
power to behold the light of clay amid the sands of the silent desert?

Perhaps it would be well for him to leave Alexandria now, and she
described how much benefit she had received while hunting from the
silence of the wilderness, when she had left the noise of the city
behind her. But before she had quite finished, the knocking at the door
was repeated.

The lovers took leave of each other with one last kiss, and the final
words of the departing girl echoed consolingly in the blind man's heart,
"The more they take from you, the more closely I will cling to you."

Hermon spent the latter portion of the night rejoicing in the
consciousness of a great happiness, yet also troubled by the difficult
task which he could not escape.

When the market place was filling, gray-haired Philippus visited him.

He desired before the examination, for which every preparation had been
made, to understand personally the relation of his dead comrade's son to
the defeated conspiracy, and he soon perceived that Hermon's presence at
the banquet was due solely to an unlucky accident or in consequence of
the Queen's desire to win him over to her plot.

Yet he was forced to advise the blind sculptor to leave Alexandria. The
suspicion that he had been associated with the conspirators was the more
difficult to refute, because his Uncle Archias had imprudently allowed
himself to be persuaded by Proclus and Arsinoe to lend the Queen large
sums, which had undoubtedly been used to promote her abominable plans.

Philippus also informed him that he had just come from Archias, whom he
had earnestly urged to fly as quickly as possible from the persecuti