"Alas!"
"You are not glad to see me, Chione; you have lost your love for me!"
"Oh! would it were so, Magas! would that the sight of you did not move me thus; would I had never known you! Leave me, Magas!"
"Leave you now when, after a year's search, I have found you! Leave you! What is the meaning of this altered tone? Are you no longer Chione? Am I not Magas?"
"It is true," said Chione, in a very low voice; "it is true I am the slave Chione."
"The slave! O Chione! have I not promised you freedom if you but return my love? Last year did I not bid you become to me what Aspasia was to Pericles—my oracle, my inspirer, my divinity! and you left me; and now that your glowing charms have become endued even with a higher lustre; that your voice can at will enkindle each noble emotion while it thrills the soul with ecstasy, now your empire over me is all but overpowering."
"Yet you did not recognize me when I sang in the temple a week ago."
"Not at first; the theme was so strange; it troubled me. But at the first tone uttered in the grove I knew you; I felt that you, and you only, could cause such a thrill as then agitated my whole being. O Chione! you were ever to me as the tenth muse. Say what has caused your absence?"
"Did you heed the words of the last hymn?"