barber
held before him. He nodded, with a melancholy smile, at the face--so
much aged--that looked at him from the bright surface, paid what was
asked, and did not heed the compassionate glance which the barber and
his assistant sent after him. They both thought they had been exercising
their skill on a lunatic, for he had made no answer to all their
questions, and had said nothing but once in a deep and fearfully loud
voice:

"Chatter to other people--I am in a hurry."

In truth his spirit was in no mood for idle gossip; no, it was full of
gnawing anxiety and tender fears, and his heart bled when he reflected
that he had broken his vows, and forsworn the oath he had made to his
dying mother.

When he reached the palace-gate he begged one of the civic guard to
conduct him to his brother, and as he backed his request with a gift
of money he was led at once to the man whom he sought. Glaucus was
excessively startled to recognize Serapion, but he was so much
engaged that he could only give up a few minutes to his brother, whose
proceedings he considered as both inexplicable and criminal.

Irene, as the anchorite now learned, had been carried off from the
temple, not by Euergetes but by the Roman, and Klea had quitted the
palace only a few minutes since in a chariot and would return about
midnight and on foot from the second tavern to the temple. And the poor
child was so utterly alone, and her way lay through the desert where she
might be attacked by dissolute soldiery or tomb-robbers or jackals and
hyenas. Her walk was to begin from the second tavern, and that was the
very spot where low rioters were wont to assemble--and his darling was
so young, so fair, and so defenceless!

He was once more a prey to the same unendurable dread that had come over
him, in his cell, after Klea had left the temple and darkness had closed
in. At that moment he had felt all that a father could feel who from his
prison-window sees his beloved and defenceless child snatched away by
some beast of prey. All the perils that could threaten her in the palace
or in the city, swarming with drunken soldiers, had risen before his
mind with fearful vividness, and his powerful imagination had painted in
glaring colors all the dangers to which his favorite--the daughter of a
noble and respected man--might be exposed.

He rushed up and down his cell like a wounded tiger, he flung himself
against the walls, and then, with his body hanging far out of