that messengers from the wife of her grandson Hanno had arrived, there
was a movement at the back of the room, and broken sentences, gasped
with difficulty, expressed the old dame's wish to receive the strangers.

On a sheep's-wool couch, over which was spread a wolfskin, the last
gift of her son Satabus, lay the sorceress, who raised herself as Hermon
passed through the door.

After his greeting, she pointed to her deaf ear and begged him to
speak louder. At the same time she gazed into his eyes with a keen,
penetrating glance, and interrupted him by the question: "The Greek
sculptor whose studio was burned over his head? And blind? Blind still?"

"In both eyes," Bias answered for his master.

"And you, fellow?" the old dame asked; then, recollecting herself,
stopped the reply on the servant's lips with the hasty remark: "You
are the blackbeard's slave--a Biamite? Oh, I remember perfectly! You
disappeared with the burning house."

Then she gazed intently and thoughtfully from one to the other, and
at last, pointing to Bias, muttered in a whisper: "You alone come from
Hanno and Ledscha, and were with them on the Hydra? Very well. What news
have you for the old woman from the young couple?"

The freedman began to relate what brought him to the Owl's Nest, and
the gray-haired crone listened eagerly until he said that Ledscha lived
unhappily with her husband, and therefore had left him. She sent back
to her, as the head of Hanno's family, the bridal dowry with which Hanno
had bought her from her father as his wife.

Then Tabus struggled into a little more erect posture, and asked: "What
does this mean? Five talents--and gold, not silver talents? And she
sends the money to me? To me? And she ran away from her husband? But
no--no! Once more--you are a Biamite--repeat it in our own language--and
loudly. This ear is the better one."

Bias obeyed, and the old dame listened to the end without interrupting
him: then raising her brown right hand, covered with a network of
blue-black veins, she clinched it into a fist, which she shook far more
violently than Bias would have believed possible in her weak condition.
At the same time she pressed her lips so tightly together that her
toothless mouth deepened into a hole, and her dim eyes shone with a
keen, menacing light. For some time she found no reply, though strange,
rattling, gasping sounds escaped her heaving breast.

At last she succeeded in uttering words, and shrieke