It was long since Hermon had felt so free and light-hearted as during
this voyage.

He firmly believed in his recovery.

A few days before he had escaped death in the royal palace as if by a
miracle, and he owed his deliverance to the woman he loved.

In the Temple of Nemesis at Tennis the conviction that the goddess had
ceased to persecute him took possession of his mind.

True, his blind eyes had been unable to see her menacing statue, but not
even the slightest thrill of horror had seized him in its presence. In
Alexandria, after his departure from Proclus's banquet, she had desisted
from pursuing him. Else how would she have permitted him to escape
uninjured when he was already standing upon the verge of an abyss, and a
wave of her hand would have sufficed to hurl him into the death-dealing
gulf?

But his swift confession, and the transformation which followed it, had
reconciled him not only with her, but also with the other gods; for they
appeared to him in forms as radiant and friendly as in the days of his
boyhood, when, while Bias took the helm on the long voyage through the
canal and the Bitter Lakes, he recalled the visible world to his memory
and, from the rising sun, Phoebus Apollo, the lord of light and purity,
gazed at him from his golden chariot, drawn by four horses, and
Aphrodite, the embodiment of all beauty, rose before him from the snowy
foam of the azure waves. Demeter, in the form of Daphne, appeared,
dispensing prosperity, above the swaying golden waves of the ripening