its most purple robe.

'Ho, my child, wait you for me?'

'Nay, I have been tending the flowers, and did but linger a little while
to rest myself.'

'It has been warm,' said Glaucus, placing himself also on one of the
seats beneath the colonnade.

'Very.'

'Wilt thou summon Davus? The wine I have drunk heats me, and I long for
some cooling drink.'

Here at once, suddenly and unexpectedly, the very opportunity that Nydia
awaited presented itself; of himself, at his own free choice, he
afforded to her that occasion. She breathed quick--'I will prepare for
you myself,' said she, 'the summer draught that Ione loves--of honey and
weak wine cooled in snow.'

'Thanks,' said the unconscious Glaucus. 'If Ione love it, enough; it
would be grateful were it poison.'

Nydia frowned, and then smiled; she withdrew for a few moments, and
returned with the cup containing the beverage. Glaucus took it from her
hand. What would not Nydia have given then for one hour's prerogative
of sight, to have watched her hopes ripening to effect--to have seen the
first dawn of the imagined love--to have worshipped with more than
Persian adoration the rising of that sun which her credulous soul
believed was to break upon her dreary night! Far different, as she
stood then and there, were the thoughts, the emotions of the blind girl,
from those of the vain Pompeian under a similar suspense. In the last,
what poor and frivolous passions had made up the daring whole! What
petty pique, what small revenge, what expectation of a paltry triumph,
had swelled the attributes of that sentiment she dignified with the name
of love! but in the wild heart of the Thessalian all was pure,
uncontrolled, unmodified passion--erring, unwomanly, frenzied, but
debased by no elements of a more sordid feeling. Filled with love as
with life itself, how could she resist the occasion of winning love in
return!

She leaned for support against the wall, and her face, before so
flushed, was now white as snow, and with her delicate hands clasped
convulsively together, her lips apart, her eyes on the ground, she
waited the next words Glaucus should utter.

Glaucus had raised the cup to his lips, he had already drained about a
fourth of its contents, when his eye suddenly glancing upon the face of
Nydia, he was so forcibly struck by its alteration, by its intense, and
painful, and strange expression, that he paused abruptly, and still
holding the cup near his lips,