y a spring,
exclaiming: "Thank you heartily, thank you! But that will never do. If
Zminis searches your premises he will certainly go into the cellar; for
what can he not do in Caesar's name? I will not part from my brother."

"Then you, too, are a welcome guest at the Cock," interrupted the woman,
and her husband bowed low, assuring her that the Cock was as much her
house as it was his.

But the helpless town-bred damsel declined this friendly invitation; for
her shrewd little head had devised another plan for saving her brother,
though the tavern-keepers, to whom she confided it in a whisper, laughed
and shook their heads over it. Diodoros was waiting outside in anxious
impatience; he loved her, and he was her brother's best friend. All that
he could do to save Alexander he would gladly do, she knew. On the estate
which would some day be his, there was room and to spare to hide the
fugitives, for one of the largest gardens in the town was owned by his
father. His extensive grounds had been familiar to her from her
childhood, for her own mother and her lover's had been friends; and
Andreas, the freedman, the overseer of Polybius's gardens and
plantations, was dearer to her and her brothers than any one else in
Alexandria.

Nor had she deceived herself, for Diodoros made Alexander's cause his
own, in his eager, vehement way; and the plan for his deliverance seemed
doubly admirable as proceeding from Melissa. In a few minutes Alexander
and the sculptor were released from their hiding-place, and all further
care for them was left to Diodoros.

They were both very, craftily disguised. No one would have recognized the
artists in two sailors, whose Phrygian caps completely hid their hair,
while a heavy fisherman's apron was girt about their loins; still less
would any one have suspected from their laughing faces that imprisonment,
if nothing worse, hung over them. Their change of garb had given rise to
so much fun; and now, on hearing how they were to be smuggled into the
town, their merriment grew higher, and proved catching to those who were
taken into the secret. Only Melissa was oppressed with anxious care, in
spite of her lover's eager consolation.

Glaukias, a man of scarcely middle height, was sure of not being
recognized, and he and his comrades looked forward to whatever might
happen as merely an amusing jest. At the same time they had to balk the
hated chief of the city guards and his menials of their immediat