halted outside a wall-case and faced me.

"This is my friend," she said. "Let me present you to Artemidorus, late
of the Fayyum. Oh, don't smile!" she pleaded. "I am quite serious. Have
you never heard of pious Catholics who cherish a devotion to some
long-departed saint? That is my feeling towards Artemidorus, and if you
only knew what comfort he has shed into the heart of a lonely woman;
what a quiet, unobtrusive friend he has been to me in my solitary,
friendless days, always ready with a kindly greeting on his gentle,
thoughtful face, you would like him for that alone. And I want you to
like him and to share our silent friendship. Am I very silly, very
sentimental?"

A wave of relief had swept over me, and the mercury of my emotional
thermometer, which had shrunk almost into the bulb, leaped up to summer
heat. How charming it was of her and how sweetly intimate, to wish to
share this mystical friendship with me! And what a pretty conceit it
was, too, and how like this strange, inscrutable maiden, to come here
and hold silent converse with this long-departed Greek. And the pathos
of it all touched me deeply amidst the joy of this newborn intimacy.

"Are you scornful?" she asked, with a shade of disappointment, as I made
no reply.

"No, indeed I am not," I answered earnestly. "I want to make you aware
of my sympathy and my appreciation without offending you by seeming to
exaggerate, and I don't know how to express it."

"Oh, never mind about the expression, so long as you feel it. I thought
you would understand," and she gave me a smile that made me tingle to my