Spite of the darkness outside, Clytie recognized him and exclaimed:
“Eternal Gods! What has happened? Good or evil fortune? Speak, speak, I implore you.”
Hipyllos listened in delight. Every word uttered by the young girl’s lips echoed with a silvery cadence upon the silence of the night.
He pushed a log against the wall with his foot, and sprang upon it.
“Dear, lovely Clytie,” he whispered, “give me your hand! What I have to say is surely worth a clasp of the fingers.”
He now told her in a few words the events of the evening; but he was apparently not satisfied with a mere clasp of the hand.
Suddenly the street was illumined by a broad ray of light and, though Hipyllos’ shadow, gigantic and strangely distorted, fell on the wall and the loop-hole it was not difficult for the new-comers to see that he was in the act of pressing his lips upon a dazzlingly white arm, which vainly strove to escape the caress.
“Aha!” cried an angry voice, “a pretty sight, by Heracles....”
Clytie, with a half-stifled shriek, vanished from the loop-hole and Hipyllos, turning, leaped down from the log.
Accompanied by a slave bearing a blazing torch Xenocles, after following a cross-path over the hill, had just emerged from the shrubbery. Hipyllos had not thought that the active little man, spite of his age, was almost as agile in his gait as he himself.