same feeling?"

Selene shook her head.

"You are not happy?"

"No."

"I know full well that you have very heavy duties to perform for your
age."

"Things go as they may."

"Nay, nay. I know you do not let things go haphazard. You take care of
your brothers and sisters like a mother."

"Like a mother!" repeated Selene, and she smiled a bitter negative.

"Of course a mother's love is a thing by itself, but your father and the
little ones have every reason to be satisfied with yours."

"The little ones are perhaps, and Helios who is blind, but Arsinoe does
what she can."

"You certainly are not content, I can hear it in your voice, and you
used formerly to be as merry and happy as your sister, though perhaps
not so saucy."

"Formerly--"

"How sadly that sounds! And yet you are handsome, you are young, and
life lies before you."

"But what a life!"

"Well, what?" asked the sculptor, and taking his hands from his work
he looked ardently at the fair pale girl before him and cried out
fervently:

"A life which might be full of happiness and satisfied affection."

The girl shook her head in negation and answered coldly:

"'Love is joy,' says the Christian woman who superintends us at work
in the papyrus factory, and since my mother died I have had no love. I
enjoyed all my share of happiness once for all in my childhood, now I
am content if only we are spared the worst misfortunes. Otherwise I take
what each day brings, because I can not do otherwise. My heart is empty,
and if I ever feel anything keenly, it is dread. I have long since
ceased to expect any thing good of the future."

"Girl!" exclaimed Pollux. "Why, what has been happening to you? I do
not understand half of what you are saying. How came you in the papyrus
factory?"

"Do not betray me," begged Selene. "If my father were to hear of it."

"He is asleep, and what you confide to me no one will ever hear of
again."

"Why should I conceal it? I go every day with Arsinoe for two hours to
the manufactory, and we work there to earn a little money."

"Behind your father's back?"

"Yes, he would rather that we should starve than allow it. Every day I
feel the same loathing for the deceit; but we could not get on without
it, for Arsinoe thinks of nothing but herself, plays draughts with my
father, curls his hair, plays with the children as if they were dolls,
but it is my part to take care of them."

"And you, you say, have no share of lov