wherewith
to reproach herself afforded her no consolation. As a poet has said,
only the innocent know remorse. She was repenting of the crime which
another had committed.

Nevertheless she made an effort to recover herself, ordered the baskets
filled with wools of different colours, and the spindles wrapped with
flax, to be brought to her, and distributed the work to her women as she
had been accustomed to do; but she thought she noticed that the slaves
looked at her in a very peculiar way, and had ceased to entertain the
same timid respect for her as before. Her voice no longer rang with the
same assurance; there was something humble and furtive in her demeanour;
she felt herself interiorly fallen.

Doubtless her scruples were exaggerated, and her virtue had received
no stain from the folly of Candaules; but ideas imbibed with a mother's
milk obtain irresistible sway, and the modesty of the body is carried
by Oriental nations to an extent almost incomprehensible to Occidental
races. When a man desired to speak to Nyssia in the palace of Megabazus
at Bactria, he was obliged to do so keeping his eyes fixed upon the
ground, and two eunuchs stood beside him, poniard in hand, ready to
plunge their keen blades through his heart should he dare lift his head
to look at the princess, notwithstanding that her face was veiled. You
may readily conceive, therefore, how deadly an injury the action of
Candaules would seem to a woman thus brought up, while any other would
doubtless have considered it only a culpable frivolity. Thus the idea
of vengeance had instantly presented itself to Nyssia, and had given her
sufficient self-control to strangle the cry of her offended modesty ere
it reached her lips, at the moment when, turning her head, she beheld
the burning eyes of Gyges flaming through the darkness. She must have
possessed the courage of the warrior in ambush, who, wounded by a random
dart, utters no syllable of pain through fear of betraying himself
behind his shelter of foliage or river-reeds, and in silence permits his
blood to stripe his flesh with long red lines. Had she not withheld that
first impulse to cry aloud, Candaules, alarmed and forewarned, would
have kept upon his guard, which must have rendered it more difficult, if
not impossible, to carry out her purpose.

Nevertheless, as yet she had conceived no definite plan, but she had
resolved that the insult done to her honour should be fully expiated. At
first she