The girl nodded. The young man continued talking as they hurried on in the direction whence the rough man had appeared. “She came to Naxos in the company of that brutish-looking man we met and I intended to protect her, but you know the result! When I saw you, you were in dire need of help and I could no more have left you to suffer at the hands of that traitor than I did that day on the Acropolis when the Persian, Artabazus would have harmed you.”
He turned half timidly to her, ashamed of his adoration for her whom he now had no right to desire; for the image of a pure and noble maiden stood between them.
“Tell me how you knew Ephialtes to be the man who betrayed Greece at Thermopylæ,” she asked.
Zopyrus related in detail the episode of his eavesdropping in the tent of Xerxes, and Persephone was about to tell why Ephialtes had been so eager to accuse someone of being the traitor at Thermopylæ, when a white form, partially concealed by undergrowth a few paces before them, attracted their attention simultaneously.
Zopyrus sprang ahead and dropped to his knees beside the prone figure of a girl which he discovered lay in the stillness of death. Something cold seemed to grip his heart and everything about him seemed to melt into a whirling cloud! With a faint cry of anguish he lost consciousness just as Persephone ran up to him. She bent over him and looked into the lifeless face of the girl.
It was Corinna, the daughter of Pasicles!
CHAPTER XXVI.
The Home of Aeschylus.
“Gone, and the light gone with her,
And left me in shadow here!”
Tennyson.