r menacing statue, but not
even the slightest thrill of horror had seized him in its presence. In
Alexandria, after his departure from Proclus's banquet, she had desisted
from pursuing him. Else how would she have permitted him to escape
uninjured when he was already standing upon the verge of an abyss, and a
wave of her hand would have sufficed to hurl him into the death-dealing
gulf?

But his swift confession, and the transformation which followed it, had
reconciled him not only with her, but also with the other gods; for they
appeared to him in forms as radiant and friendly as in the days of his
boyhood, when, while Bias took the helm on the long voyage through the
canal and the Bitter Lakes, he recalled the visible world to his memory
and, from the rising sun, Phoebus Apollo, the lord of light and purity,
gazed at him from his golden chariot, drawn by four horses, and
Aphrodite, the embodiment of all beauty, rose before him from the snowy
foam of the azure waves. Demeter, in the form of Daphne, appeared,
dispensing prosperity, above the swaying golden waves of the ripening
grain fields and bestowing peace beside the domestic hearth. The whole
world once more seemed peopled with deities, and he felt their rule in
his own breast.

The place of which Bias had told him was situated on a lofty portion of
the shore. Beside the springs which there gushed from the soil of the
desert grew green palm trees and thorny acacias. Farther on flourished
the fragrant betharan. About a thousand paces from this spot the faithful
freedman pitched the little tent obtained in Tennis under the shade of
several tall palm trees and a sejal acacia.

Not far from the springs lived the same family of Amalekites whom Bias
had known from boyhood. They raised a few vegetables in little beds, and
the men acted as guards to the caravans which came from Egypt through the
peninsula of Sinai to Petrea and Hebron. The daughter of the aged sheik
whose men accompanied the trains of goods, a pleasant, middle-aged woman,
recognised the Biamite, who when a boy had recovered under her mother's
nursing, and promised Bias to honour his blind master as a valued guest
of the tribe.

Not until after he had done everything in his power to render life in the
wilderness endurable, and had placed a fresh bandage over his eyes, would
Bias leave his master.

The freedman entered the boat weeping, and Hermon, deeply agitated,
turned his face toward him.

When he