Damia gave a hasty, sidelong glance at her grandchild, and a cold chill ran through her; the--girl stood and spoke with an air of inspiration--she was full of the divinity as Damia thought, and the old woman herself felt as though she were in a temple and in the immediate presence of the Immortals.
Gorgo waited for a reply, but in vain; and as her grandmother remained silent she went back to her place by the pedestal.

At last Damia raised her wrinkled face, looked straight in the girl's eyes and asked: "And what is to be the end of it ?" "Aye--what ?" said Gorgo gloomily and she shook her head.

"I ask myself and can find no answer, for his image is ever present to me and yet walls and mountains stand between us.

That face, that image--I might perhaps force myself to shatter it; but nothing shall ever induce me to let it be defiled or disgraced! Nothing!" The old woman sank into brooding thought once more; mechanically she repeated Gorgo's last word, and at intervals that gradually became longer she murmured, at last scarcely audibly: "Nothing--nothing!" She had lost all sense of time and of her immediate surroundings, and long-forgotten sorrows crowded on her memory: The dreadful day when a young freedman--a gifted astronomer and philosopher who had been appointed her tutor, and whom she had loved with all the passion of a vehement nature--had been kicked out of her father's house by slaves, for daring to aspire to her hand.

She had given him up--she had been forced to do so; and after she was the wife of another and he had risen to fame, she had never given him any token that she had not forgotten him.