good, right is right for all, whether they pray to one God or to several.
If you keep your heart pure, and constantly think of the time which shall
be fulfilled for each of us, to our ruin or to our salvation, you will
pass unharmed through this great peril. I know it, I feel it."

"But you do not know him," exclaimed Melissa, "and how terrible he can
be! And Diodoros! When he is well again, if he hears that I am with
Caesar, in obedience to his call whenever he sends for me, and if evil
tongues tell him dreadful things about me, he, too, will condemn me!"

"No, no," the matron declared, kissing her brow and eyes. "If he loves
you truly, he will trust you."

"He loves me," sobbed Melissa; "but, even if he does not desert me when I
am thus branded, his father will come between us."

"God forbid!" cried Euryale. "Remain what you are, and I will always be
the same to you, come what may; and those who love you will not refuse to
listen to an old woman who has grown gray in honor."

And Melissa believed her motherly, kind, worthy friend; and, with the new
confidence which revived in her, her longing for her lover began to stir
irresistibly. She wanted a fond glance from the eyes of the youth who
loved her, and to whom, for another man's sake, she could not give all
his due, nay, who had perhaps a right to complain of her. This she
frankly confessed, and the matron herself conducted the impatient girl to
see Diodoros.

Melissa again found Andreas in attendance on the sufferer, and she was
surprised at the warmth with which the high-priest's wife greeted the