“What must I do?” she said to the gaoler.
“Walk about the room, my girl, until you feel a heaviness in the legs. Then lie down on your back, and the poison will do the rest.”
Chrysis walked to the window, leaned her head against the wall, with her temples in her hand, and cast a last look of vanished youth upon the violet dawn.
The orient was bathed in a sea of colour. A long band, livid as a water leaf, enveloped the horizon with an olive-coloured girdle. Higher up, several tints sprang out of one another, liquid sheets of blue-green sky, irisated, or lilac-coloured, melting insensibly into the leaden azure of the upper heavens. Then, these tiers of colour rose slowly, a line of gold appeared, mounted, expanded: a thin thread of purple illumined this melancholic dawn, and, in a flood of blood, the sun was born.
It is written:
"The light is sweet . . .”
She remained thus, standing, so long as her legs could sustain her. When she showed signs of reeling, the hoplites carried her to the bed.
There, the old man disposed the white folds of the robe along the rigid limbs. Then he touched her feet and asked her:
“Do you feel anything?”