sparkled; he walked round the
table with an attentive gaze examining his work as keenly and as eagerly
as if it were some fine thing he saw for the first time. Memory revived
in his mind. He laughed aloud, clasped his hands and said to himself,
"Capital! Something may be made of that!"

His dull weariness slipped off him, as it were; a confident smile parted
his lips and he seized the wax with a firm hand. But he did not begin
to work at once; he only tried whether his fingers had not lost their
cunning, and whether the yielding material was obedient to his will. The
wax was no less docile to his touch than in former days, as he pinched
or pulled it. Perhaps then the tormenting thought that blighted his
life, the dread that in the prison he had ceased to be an artist, and
had lost all his faculty was nothing more than a mad delusion! He must
at any rate try how he could get on at the work.

No one was by to observe him--he might dare the attempt at once.
The sweat of anguish stood in large beads on his brow as he finally
concentrated his volition, shook back the hair from his face and took
up a lump of the wax in both hands. There stood the portrait of Antinous
with the head only half-finished. Now--could he succeed in modelling
that lovely head free-hand and from memory?

His breath came fast, and his hands trembled as he set to work; but soon
his hand was as steady as ever, his eye was calm and keen again, and the
work progressed. The fine features of the young Bithynian were distinct
to his mind's eye, and when, about four hours after, his mother looked
in at the window to see what Pollux was doing, whether her little
stratagem had succeeded, she cried out with surprise, for the favorite's
bust, a likeness in every feature, stood on a plinth side by side with
the original sketch. Before she could cross the threshold her son had
run to meet her, lifted her in his arms, and kissing her forehead and
lips he exclaimed, radiant with delight:

"Mother, I still can work. Mother, mother, I am not lost!"

In the afternoon his brother came in and saw what he had been doing, and
now--and not till now--could Teuker honestly be glad to have found his
brother again.

While the two artists were sitting together, and the gem-cutter was
suggesting to the sculptor, who had complained of the bad light in
his parent's house, that he should carry the statue to his master's
workshop--which was much lighter--to complete it, Euphorio