Twenty paces farther on, she burst out laughing, as she caught sight of a ridiculous couple hidden between two bushes. That sufficed to change the current of her young thoughts.
She took the longest road before returning to her hut, and then decided not to go home at all. It was a magnificent, warm, moonlight night. The gardens were full of many voices and songs. Satisfied with what she had earned through the visit of Demetrios, she was seized with a sudden fancy to play the part of a vagrant girl of roads and ditches, in the depths of the wood, with pauper passers-by. In this way, she was enjoyed twice or three against a tree, a stone pillar, or on a bench, and found amusement as if the game was new, because the scene kept changing. A soldier, standing in the middle of a pathway, lifted her bodily up in his robust arms and identified himself with the God of the Gardens who joins himself to the wenches who tend the rose-trees without needing to let the hussies feet touch the ground. At this, Melitta uttered a cry of triumph.
Escaping again, she continued her flight through an avenue of palms, where she met a lad, named Mikyllos, seemingly lost in the forest. She offered to be his guide, but led him astray designedly, so as to keep him with her for her own purposes. Mikyllos was not long in fathoming Melitta’s intentions, as well as her tiny talents and capabilities. Soon becoming companions, rather than lovers, they ran along side by side in solitude that grew more and more silent. Suddenly, they came in front of the sea.
The spot where they found themselves was far distant from the parts where the courtesans generally celebrated the rites of their religious profession. Why they chose other trysting-places in preference to this—the most admirable of all—they could not have told you. The part of the wood where the crowd gathered soon became a notorious central alley, surrounded by a network of bypaths and starry glades. On the outskirts, despite the charm or the beauty of the sites, there reigned eternal solitude where luxuriant vegetation flourished peacefully.
Thus strolling, hand in hand, Mikyllos and Melitta reached the limit of the public park, a low hedge of aloes, forming a useless dividing line between the gardens of Aphrodite and those of her High Priest.
Encouraged by the hushed solitude of this flowery wilderness, the young couple easily climbed over the irregular wall formed by the quaint twisted plants. The Mediterranean, at their feet, slowly swept the shore, with wavelets like the fringes of a river. The two children waded in breast-high and chased each other, laughing meanwhile, as they tried to effect difficult conjunctions in the water. They soon put an end to these sports, which failed like games insufficiently rehearsed. After that, luminous and dripping wet, wriggling their frog-like legs in the moonlight, they sprang upon the dark edge of the sea.
Traces of footprints on the sand urged the boy and girl onwards. They walked, ran, and struggled, pulling each other by the hand; their black, well-defined shadows sketching bold outlines of their two figures. How far were they to go in this wise? They saw no other living things on the immense azure horizon.
“Ah! Look!” exclaimed Melitta, all of a sudden.
“What’s the matter?”
“There’s a woman!”