Her magnificently curved figure, her wonderful
face, her fiery personality were as much a part of his dreams as the bed
he slept on.

If not for her brother ...

Forrester sighed and forced himself to return his attention to his
duties. His hands remained clasped reverently at his breast. Whatever
battle went on in his mind, the remaining few people in the great room
would see nothing but what was fitting. At any rate, he told himself, he
made rather an imposing sight in his robes, and, with a stirring of
vanity which he prayed Athena to chasten, he was rather proud of it.

He was a fairly tall man, just a shade under six feet, but his slight
paunch made him seem shorter than he was. His face was round and smooth
and pleasant, and that made him look younger than he was: twenty-one
instead of twenty-seven. As befitted an acolyte of the Goddess of
Wisdom, his dark, curly hair was cut rather long. When he bowed to a
departing worshipper, lowering his head in graceful acknowledgment of
their deferential nods, he felt that he made a striking and commanding
picture.

Though, of course, the worshippers weren't doing him any honor. That bow
was not for him, but directed toward the Owl, the symbol of the Goddess
embroidered on the breast of the white tunic. As an acolyte, after all,
he rated just barely above a layman; he had no powers whatever.

Athena knew that, naturally. But somehow it was a little difficult to
get it through his own doubtless too-thick skull. He'd often dreamed of
power. Being a priest or a priestess, for instance--now that meant
something. At least people paid attention to you if you were a member of
the hierarchy, favored of the Gods. But, Forrester knew, there was no
chance of that any more. Either you were picked before you were
twenty-one, or you weren't picked at all, and that was all there was to
it. In spite of his looks, Forrester was six years past the limit.

And so he'd become an acolyte. Sometimes he wondered how much of that
had been an honest desire to serve Athena, and how much a sop to his
worldly vanity. Certainly a college history instructor had enough to do,
without adding the unpaid religious services of an acolyte to his work.

But these were thoughts unworthy of his position. They reminded him of
his own childhood, when he had dreamed of becoming one of the Lesser
Gods, or even Zeus himself! Zeus had provided the best answer to those
dreams, Forrester knew. "Now I am a man," Ze