original suggestions, gave his work and his play alike, the stamp of
genius, and lent them a peculiar charm. And there sat her saucy
playfellow in person, his legs stretched at full length in front of him,
and talking, eagerly. Arsinoe heard him relating the end of the history
of her being chosen for Roxana, and caught her own name, graced with such
epithets as brought the blushes to her cheeks, and gave her double
pleasure because he could not guess that she could overhear them. From a
boy he had grown to a man, and a fine man, and a great artist--but he was
still the old kind and audacious Pollux.

The sudden leap with which he sprang from his seat to welcome her, the
frank laughter with which he several times interrupted her speech, the
childlike loving way in which he held his arm round his little mother
while he greeted her, and asked why she was going out so late, the
winning, touching tone of his voice as he expressed his regret at
Selene's mishaps--all went home to Arsinoe as a thing known and loved,
of which she had long been deprived, and she clung to the two strong
hands he held out to her. If at that moment he had taken her up, and
clasped her to his heart before the very eyes of Eupliorion and his
mother she really would have been incapable of resisting him.

It was with a heavy heart that Arsinoe had gone into dame Doris, but in
the gate-keeper's house there reigned an atmosphere in which care and
anxiety could not breathe, and the light-hearted girl's vision of her
sister as tormented with pain and threatened with danger was changed in
a wonderfully short time to that of a sufferer comfortably in bed, with
only a severely-injured foot. In the place of consuming anxiety she felt
only hearty sympathy, and this sounded in her voice as she begged the
singer Euphorion to open the gate for her, because she wanted to go out
with her slave-woman to ascertain how Selene was.