"We use no deception," interrupted the high-priest, sternly rebuking his
colleague. "We only present to short-sighted mortals the creative power
of the divinity in a form perceptible and intelligible to their senses."

With these words the tall priest turned his back on the smith and quitted
the hall by a side door; Krates opened the brazen door, and as he
gathered together his tools he said to himself, but loud enough for Klea
to hear him distinctly in her hiding-place:

"It may be right for me, but deceit is deceit, whether a god deceives
a king or a child deceives a beggar."

"Deceit is deceit," repeated Klea after the smith when he had left the
hall and she had emerged from her corner.

She stood still for a moment and looked round her. For the first time
she observed the shabby colors on the walls, the damage the pillars had
sustained in the course of years, and the loose slabs in the pavement.

The sweetness of the incense sickened her, and as she passed by an old
man who threw up his arms in fervent supplication, she looked at him with
a glance of compassion.

When she had passed out beyond the pylons enclosing the temple she turned
round, shaking her head in a puzzled way as she gazed at it; for she knew
that not a stone had been changed within the last hour, and yet it looked
as strange in her eyes as some landscape with which we have become
familiar in all the beauty of spring, and see once more in winter with
its trees bare of leaves; or like the face of a woman which we thought
beautiful under the veil which hid it, and which, when the veil is