He rose, gazed once more at Touni as she lifted up her great eyes to him, and taking one of the two gold pins from her hair, he buried it in her left breast.
CHAPTER IV
APHRODITE’S PEARLS
Yet this woman would have given him her comb and even her hair for love of him.
It was simply a scruple which had prevented him asking her for it: Chrysis had very clearly desired a crime and not the ancient ornament from a young woman’s hair. That was the reason he believed it his duty to take part in the shedding of blood.
He might have considered that oaths made to a woman during an access of love can be forgotten afterwards without any great harm being done to the moral worth of the lover who has sworn them, and that, if ever this involuntary forgetfulness were excusable, it was so in the circumstances when the life of another woman, who was quite innocent, was being weighed in the balance. But Demetrios did not stay to reason thus. The adventure he had undertaken seemed to him too curious to be stayed by incidents of violence.
So after cutting off Touni’s hair and concealing the ivory comb in his clothing, he without further reflection undertook the third of the tasks ordered by Chrysis: the taking of the necklace of Aphrodite.
There was no question of entering the temple by the great door. The twelve hermaphrodites who kept the door would no doubt have allowed Demetrios to enter, in spite of the order which refused admission to the unsanctified in the priest’s absence; but what was the use of thus simply establishing his guilt for the future when there was a secret entry leading to the sanctuary. Demetrios wended his way to a lonely part of the wood where the necropolis of the High Priests of the Goddess was situated. He counted the tombs, opened the door of the seventh, and closed it behind him.
With great difficulty, for the stone was heavy, he raised a slab within the tomb which disclosed a marble staircase and descended it step by step.