eping the roadway. Here there were parties of men, women, and
children on their way to work in factories, which were at rest but for a
few hours in the bustling town. The bakers and other provision-dealers
were opening their shops; the cobblers and metalworkers were already busy
or lighting fires in their open stalls; and Andreas nodded to a file of
slave-girls who had come across from the farm and gardens of Polybius,
and who now walked up the street with large milk-jars and baskets of
vegetables poised on their heads and supported with one gracefully raised
arm.

They presently crossed the Aspendia Canal, where the fog hung over the
water like white smoke, hiding the figure of the tutelary goddess of the
town on the parapet of the bridge from those who crossed by the roadway.
The leaves of the mimosa-trees by the quay--nay, the very stones of the
houses and the statues, wet with the morning dew--looked revived and
newly washed; and a light breeze brought up from the Serapeum broken
tones of the chant, sung there every morning by a choir of priests, to
hail the triumph of light over darkness.

The crisp morning air was as invigorating to Melissa as her cold bath had
been, after a night which had brought her so little rest. She felt as
though she, and all Nature with her, had just crossed the threshold of a
new day, bidding her to fresh life and labor. Now and then a flame from
Lucifer's torch swallowed up a stretch of morning mist, while the Hours
escorted Phoebus Apollo, whose radiant diadem of beams was just rising
above the haze; Melissa could have declared she saw them dancing forth
before him and strewing the path of the sun with flowers. All this was
beautiful--as beautiful as the priest's chant, the aromatic sweetness of
the air, and the works of art in cast bronze or hewn marble which were to
be seen on the bridge, on the temple to Isis and Anubis to the right of
the street, under the colonnades of the handsomest houses, on the public
fountains--in short, wherever the eye might turn. Her lover, borne before
her in a litter, was on the way to the physician in whose hands lay the
power to cure him. She felt as though Hope led the way.

Since love had blossomed in her breast her quiet life had become an
eventful one. Most of what she had gone through had indeed filled her
with alarms. Serious questions to which she had never given a thought had
been brought before her; and yet, in this brief period of anxiety she