When Melissa returned with the lighted lamp, she found her brother, who was not wont to keep still, sitting in the place where she had left him. But he sprang up as she entered, and prevented her further greeting by exclaiming:
"Patience! patience! You shall be told all. Only I did not want to worry you on the day of the festival of the dead. And besides, to-morrow perhaps he will be in a better frame of mind, and next day—"
Melissa became urgent. "If Philip is ill—" she put in.
"Not exactly ill," said he. "He has no fever, no ague-fit, no aches and pains. He is not in bed, and has no bitter draughts to swallow. Yet is he not well, any more than I, though but just now, in the dining-hall at the Elephant, I ate like a starving wolf, and could at this moment jump over this table. Shall I prove it?"
"No, no," said his sister, in growing distress. "But, if you love me,
tell me at once and plainly—"At once and plainly," sighed the painter.
"That, in any case, will not be easy. But I will do my best. You knew
Korinna?"
"Seleukus's daughter?"
"She herself—the maiden from whose corpse I am painting her portrait."
"No. But you wanted—"
"I wanted to be brief, but I care even more to be understood; and if you have never seen with your own eyes, if you do not yourself know what a miracle of beauty the gods wrought when they molded that maiden, you are indeed justified in regarding me as a fool and Philip as a madman—which, thank the gods, he certainly is not yet."
"Then he too has seen the dead maiden?"