"What are you doing? By all the gods, you have chosen the wrong time for
a quarrel! Zminis is on the way hither to take you both prisoners; he
will be here in a minute! Fly into the kitchen, girl! Dido will hide you
in the wood-store behind the hearth.-You, Philip, must squeeze into the
henhouse. Only be quick, or it will be too late!"

"Go!" cried Melissa to her brother. "Out through the kitchen window you
can get into the poultry-yard!"

She threw herself weeping into his arms, kissed him, and added, hastily:
"Whatever happens to us, I shall risk all to save my father and
Alexander. Farewell! The gods preserve us!"

She now seized Philip's wrist, as he had before grasped hers, to drag him
away; but he freed himself, saying, with an indifference which terrified
her: "Then let the worst come. Ruin may take its course. Death rather
than dishonor!"

"Madman!" the slave could not help exclaiming; and the faithful fellow,
though wont to obey, threw his arms round his master's son to drag him
away into the kitchen, while Philip pushed him off, saying:

"I will not hide, like a frightened woman!"

But the Gaul heard the approach of marching men, so, paying no further
heed to the brother, he dragged Melissa into the kitchen, where old Dido
undertook to hide her.

Philip stood panting in the studio. Through the open window he could see
the pursuers coming nearer, and the instinct of self-preservation, which
asserts itself even in the strongest, prompted him to follow the slave's
advice. But before he could reach the door, in fancy he saw himself
joining the party of philosophers airing themselves under the arcades in
the great court of the Museum; he heard their laughter and their bitter
jests at the skeptic, the independent thinker, who had sought refuge
among the fowls, who had been hauled out of the hen-house; and this
picture confirmed his determination to yield to force rather than bring
on himself the curse of ridicule. But at the same time other reasons for
submitting to his fate suggested themselves unbidden--reasons more worthy
of his position, of the whole course and aim of his thoughts, and of the
sorrow which weighed upon his soul. It beseemed him as a skeptic to
endure the worst with equanimity; under all circumstances he liked to be
in the right, and he would fain have called out to his sister that the
cruel powers whose enmity he had incurred still persisted in driving him
on to despair and death, worth