As for his compliments to her beauty, she was far too much accustomed to such, to be either pleased or displeased by them.

But she felt, as she said, that she had lost perhaps her only true pupil; and more--perhaps her only true master.

For she saw clearly enough, that under that Silenus' mask was hidden a nature capable of--perhaps more than she dare think of.

She had always felt him her superior in practical cunning; and that morning had proved to her what she had long suspected, that he was possibly also her superior in that moral earnestness and strength of will for which she looked in vain among the enervated Greeks who surrounded her.

And even in those matters in which he professed himself her pupil, she had long been alternately delighted by finding that he alone, of all her school, seemed thoroughly and instinctively to comprehend her every word, and chilled by the disagreeable suspicion that he was only playing with her, and her mathematics and geometry, and meta-physic and dialectic, like a fencer practising with foils, while he reserved his real strength for some object more worthy of him.