said Nydia, abruptly.

'The dear child speaks for thee,' returned the Athenian. 'But permit me
to move opposite to thee, or our light boat will be over-balanced.'

So saying, he took his seat exactly opposite to Ione, and leaning
forward, he fancied that it was her breath, and not the winds of summer,
that flung fragrance over the sea.

'Thou wert to tell me,' said Glaucus, 'why for so many days thy door was
closed to me?'

'Oh, think of it no more!' answered Ione, quickly; 'I gave my ear to
what I now know was the malice of slander.'

'And my slanderer was the Egyptian?'

Ione's silence assented to the question.

'His motives are sufficiently obvious.'

'Talk not of him,' said Ione, covering her face with her hands, as if to
shut out his very thought.

'Perhaps he may be already by the banks of the slow Styx,' resumed
Glaucus; 'yet in that case we should probably have heard of his death.
Thy brother, methinks, hath felt the dark influence of his gloomy soul.
When we arrived last night at thy house he left me abruptly. Will he
ever vouchsafe to be my friend?'

'He is consumed with some secret care,' answered Ione, tearfully.
'Would that we could lure him from himself! Let us join in that tender
office.'

'He shall be my brother,' returned the Greek.

'How calmly,' said Ione, rousing herself from the gloom into which her
thoughts of Apaecides had plunged her--'how calmly the clouds seem to
repose in heaven; and yet you tell me, for I knew it not myself, that
the earth shook beneath us last night.'

'It did, and more violently, they say, than it has done since the great
convulsion sixteen years ago: the land we live in yet nurses mysterious
terror; and the reign of Pluto, which spreads beneath our burning
fields, seems rent with unseen commotion. Didst thou not feel the earth
quake, Nydia, where thou wert seated last night? and was it not the
fear that it occasioned thee that made thee weep?'

'I felt the soil creep and heave beneath me, like some monstrous
serpent,' answered Nydia; 'but as I saw nothing, I did not fear: I
imagined the convulsion to be a spell of the Egyptian's. They say he
has power over the elements.'

'Thou art a Thessalian, my Nydia,' replied Glaucus, 'and hast a national
right to believe in magic.

'Magic!--who doubts it?' answered Nydia, simply: 'dost thou?'

'Until last night (when a necromantic prodigy did indeed appal me),
methinks I was not credulous in any other magi