seemed to possess all the austerities of fanaticism, without any of the
consolations of belief It was natural that he should yet cling to a
yearning desire to reconcile himself to an irrevocable career. The
powerful and profound mind of the Egyptian yet claimed an empire over
his young imagination; excited him with vague conjecture, and kept him
alternately vibrating between hope and fear.

Meanwhile Arbaces pursued his slow and stately way to the house of Ione.
As he entered the tablinum, he heard a voice from the porticoes of the
peristyle beyond, which, musical as it was, sounded displeasingly on his
ear--it was the voice of the young and beautiful Glaucus, and for the
first time an involuntary thrill of jealousy shot through the breast of
the Egyptian. On entering the peristyle, he found Glaucus seated by the
side of Ione. The fountain in the odorous garden cast up its silver
spray in the air, and kept a delicious coolness in the midst of the
sultry noon. The handmaids, almost invariably attendant on Ione, who
with her freedom of life preserved the most delicate modesty, sat at a
little distance; by the feet of Glaucus lay the lyre on which he had
been playing to Ione one of the Lesbian airs. The scene--the group
before Arbaces, was stamped by that peculiar and refined ideality of
poesy which we yet, not erroneously, imagine to be the distinction of
the ancients--the marble columns, the vases of flowers, the statue,
white and tranquil, closing every vista; and, above all, the two living
forms, from which a sculptor might have caught either inspiration or
despair!

Arbaces, pausing for a moment, gazed on the pair with a brow from which
all the usual stern serenity had fled; he recovered himself by an
effort, and slowly approached them, but with a step so soft and
echoless, that even the attendants heard him not; much less Ione and her