Lysimachus and his daughter looked at each other. Their thoughts reached out and gathered in for contemplation all the details and the results of the climax. Then the alabarch opened his arms to his daughter and she slipped down on his breast.
"Tell me what thou knowest against Flaccus, and why I have not learned of this?" he urged.
It was a sore trial to Lydia's conscience to leave out her own part in the story she told, but the alabarch was less attentive to the source of her information than to the information itself.
"I did not tell it sooner, because, in ignorance thou wouldst not be constantly hiding from Flaccus a distaste, distrust and watchfulness that infallibly would have controlled thee hadst thou known his hands were red with the blood of a man of whom he spoke fair and whom he pretended to love, before the world!"
"What shall we do?" she asked after a long silence, for the press of many evils had stunned her resourcefulness.
"Tell the princess first," the alabarch responded.
"And then?"
"Fight! He can invent twenty excuses to take Cypros from me by law and against her will."
"Then we must hide her and speedily!"
The alabarch thrust his old waxen fingers into his white locks.