This she
frankly confessed, and the matron herself conducted the impatient girl to
see Diodoros.

Melissa again found Andreas in attendance on the sufferer, and she was
surprised at the warmth with which the high-priest's wife greeted the
Christian.

Diodoros was already able to be dressed and to sit up. He was pale and
weak, and his head was still bound up, but he welcomed the girl
affectionately, though with a mild reproach as to the rarity of her
visits.

Andreas had already informed him that Melissa was kept away by her
mediation for the prisoners, and so he was comforted by her assurance
that if her duty would allow of it she would never leave him again. And
the joy of having her there, the delight of gazing into her sweet, lovely
face, and the youthful gift of forgetting the past in favor of the
present, silenced every bitter reflection. He was soon blissfully
listening to her with a fresh color in his cheeks, and never had he seen
her so tender, so devoted, so anxious to show him the fullness of her
great love. The quiet, reserved girl was to-day the wooer, and with the
zeal called forth by her ardent wish to do him good, she expressed all
the tenderness of her warm heart so frankly and gladly that to him it
seemed as though Eros had never till now pierced her with the right
shaft.

As soon as Euryale was absorbed in conversation with Andreas, she offered
him her lips with gay audacity, as though in defiance of some stern
dragon of virtue, and he, drunk with rapture, enjoyed what she granted
him. And soon it was he who became daring, declaring that there would be
time enough to talk another day; that for the present her rosy mouth had
nothing to do but to cure him with kisses. And during this sweet give and
take, she implored him with pathetic fervor never, never to doubt her
love, whatever he might hear of her. Their older friends, who had turned
their backs on the couple and were talking busily by a window, paid no
heed to them, and the blissful conviction of being loved as ardently as
she loved flooded her whole being.

Only now and then did the thought of Caesar trouble for a moment the
rapture of that hour, like a hideous form appearing out of distant
clouds. She felt prompted indeed to tell her lover everything, but it
seemed so difficult to make him understand exactly how everything had
happened, and Diodoros must not be distressed. And, indeed, intoxicated
as he was with heated passion, he made the