ing indignation, while
Daphne perceived that these women had no more power to estrange her lover
from her than the bedizened beauties who were never absent from the
artists' festivals. How totally different was his intercourse with her!
His love and respect were hers alone; yet she saw in him a soul-sick man,
and persistently rejected Philotas, who wooed her with the same zeal as
before, and the other suitors who were striving to win the wealthy
heiress. She had confessed her feelings to her father, her best friend,
and persuaded him to have patience a little longer, and wait for the
change which he himself expected in his nephew.

This had not been difficult, for Archias loved Hermon, in spite of the
many anxieties he had caused him, as if he were his own son and, knowing
his daughter, he was aware that she could be happy with the man who
possessed her heart though he was deprived of sight.

The fame which Hermon had won by great genius and ability had gratified
him more than he expressed, and he could not contradict Daphne when she
asserted that, in spite of the aimless life of pleasure to which he
devoted himself, he had remained the kind-hearted, noble man he had
always been.

In fact, he used, unasked and secretly, a considerable portion of his
large revenues to relieve the distress of the poor and suffering. Archias
learned this as the steward of his nephew's property, and when to do good
he made new demands upon him, he gladly fulfilled them; only he
constantly admonished the blind man to think of his own severe sufferings
and his cure. Daphne did the same, and he willingly obeyed her advice;
for, loudly and recklessly as he pursued pleasure in social circles, he
showed himself tenderly devoted to her when he found her alone in her
father's house. Then, as in better days, he opened his heart to her
naturally and modestly and, though he refrained from vows of love, he
showed her that he did not cease to seek with her, and her alone, what
his noisy pleasures denied. Then he also found the old tone of affection,
and of late he came more frequently, and what he confided to no one else
implied to her, at least by hints.

Satiety and dissatisfaction were beginning to appear, and what he had
attempted to do for the cure of his eyes had hitherto been futile. The
remedies of the oculists to whom he had been directed by Daphne herself
had proved ineffectual. The great physician Erasistratus, from whom he
first sought h