rough the city at a
reckless pace like a madman escaped from Anticyra, and by making himself
known to the sentinels who guarded the ramparts, he had the gates opened
for him and gained the fields beyond. His brain burned, his cheeks
flamed as with the fires of fever; his breath came hotly panting through
his lips; he flung himself down upon the meadow-sod humid with the tears
of the night; and at last hearing in the darkness, through the thick
grass and water-plants, the silvery respiration of a Naiad, he dragged
himself to the spring, plunged his hands and arms into the crystal
flood, bathed his face, and drank several mouthfuls of the water in the
hope to cool the ardour which was devouring him. Any one who could have
seen him thus hopelessly bending over the spring in the feeble starlight
would have taken him for Narcissus pursuing his own shadow; but it was
not of himself assuredly that Gyges was enamoured.

The rapid apparition of Nyssia had dazzled his eyes like the keen zigzag
of a lightning flash. He beheld her floating before him in a luminous
whirlwind, and felt that never through all his life could he banish that
image from his vision. His love had grown to vastness; its flower had
suddenly burst, like those plants which open their blossoms with a clap
of thunder. To master his passion were henceforth a thing impossible: as
well counsel the empurpled waves which Poseidon lifts with his trident
to lie tranquilly in their bed of sand and cease to foam upon the rocks
of the shore. Gyges was no longer master of himself, and he felt a
miserable despair, as of a man riding in a chariot, who finds his
terrified and uncontrollable horses rushing with all the speed of a
furious gallop toward some rock-bristling precipice. A hundred thousand
projects, each wilder than the last, whirled confusedly through his
brain. He blasphemed Destiny, he cursed his mother for having given him
life, and the gods that they had not caused him to be born to a throne,
for then he might have been able to espouse the daughter of the satrap.

A frightful agony gnawed at his heart; he was jealous of the king. From
the moment of the tunic's fall at the feet of Nyssia, like the flight
of a white dove alighting upon a meadow, it had seemed to him that she
belonged to him; he deemed himself despoiled of his wealth by Candaules.
In all his amorous reveries he had never until then thought of the
husband; he had thought of the queen only as of a pu