terrified by a phantom. "Speak to me! I am sick! I want to get well! I
have tried everything! But you, you perhaps know some stronger gods, or
some resistless invocation?"

"For what purpose?" asked Spendius.

Striking his head with both his fists, he replied:

"To rid me of her!"

Then speaking to himself with long pauses he said:

"I am no doubt the victim of some holocaust which she has promised to
the gods?--She holds me fast by a chain which people cannot see. If I
walk, it is she that is advancing; when I stop, she is resting! Her eyes
burn me, I hear her voice. She encompasses me, she penetrates me. It
seems to me that she has become my soul!

"And yet between us there are, as it were, the invisible billows of a
boundless ocean! She is far away and quite inaccessible! The splendour
of her beauty forms a cloud of light around her, and at times I think
that I have never seen her--that she does not exist--and that it is all
a dream!"

Matho wept thus in the darkness; the Barbarians were sleeping. Spendius,
as he looked at him, recalled the young men who once used to entreat
him with golden cases in their hands, when he led his herd of courtesans
through the towns; a feeling of pity moved him, and he said--

"Be strong, my master! Summon your will, and beseech the gods no more,