The officers sent by the Regent to inform Didymus that his garden would be converted into a public square had just arrived.
When Gorgias entered, these magistrates, their clerks, and the witnesses accompanying them--a group of twenty men, at whose head was Apollonius, a distinguished officer of the royal treasury--were in the house.

The slave who admitted the architect informed him of it.
In the atrium a young girl, doubtless a member of the household, stopped him.

He was not mistaken in supposing that she was Helena, Didymus's younger granddaughter, of whom Barine had spoken.

True, she resembled her sister neither in face nor figure, for while the young matron's hair was fair and waving, the young girl's thick black tresses were wound around her head in a smooth braid.

Very unlike Barine's voice, too, were the deep, earnest tones trembling with emotion, in which she confronted him with the brief question, concealing a faint reproach, "Another demand ?" After first ascertaining that he was really speaking to Helena, his friend's sister, he hastily told her his name, adding that, on the contrary, he had come to protect her grandfather from a serious misfortune.
When his glance first rested upon her in the dimly lighted room, the impression she made upon him was by no means favourable.