re to recover
from the severe attack of fever which he could not shake off amid the
damp papyrus plantations surrounding his parents' house. In the dry, pure
air of the desert he recovered, and he would guide Hermon there before
returning to Myrtilus.

From Tanis they reached Tennis in a few hours, and found shelter in the
home of the superintendent of Archias's weaving establishments, whose
hospitality Myrtilus and Hermon had enjoyed before their installation in
the white house, now burned to the ground. The Alexandrian bills of
exchange were paid in gold by the lessee of the royal bank, who was a
good friend of Hermon. Toward evening, both rowed to the Owl's Nest,
taking the five talents with which the runaway wife intended to purchase
freedom from her husband.

As the men approached the central door of the pirates' house, a
middy-aged Biamite woman appeared and rudely ordered them to leave the
island. Tabus was weak, and refused to see visitors. But she was
mistaken; for when Bias, in the dialect of his tribe, shouted loudly 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