praying aloud:

"To-day I am happy and light of heart. To thy presence do I owe this,
O! Phoebus Apollo, for thou art light itself. Oh! let thy favors
continue--"

But he here broke off in his invocation, and dropped his arms, for he
heard approaching footsteps. Smiling at his childish weakness--for such
he deemed it that he should have prayed--and yet content from his pious
impulse, he turned his back on the sun, now quite risen, and stood face
to face with Irene who called out to him:

"I was beginning to think that you had got out of patience and had gone
away, when I found you no longer by the well. That distressed me--but
you were only watching Helios rise. I see it every day, and yet it
always grieves me to see it as red as it was to-day, for our Egyptian
nurse used to tell me that when the east was very red in the morning it
was because the Sun-god had slain his enemies, and it was their blood
that colored the heavens, and the clouds and the hills."

"But you are a Greek," said Lysias, "and you must know that it is Eos
that causes these tints when she touches the horizon with her rosy
fingers before Helios appears. Now to-day you are, to me, the rosy dawn
presaging a fine day."

"Such a ruddy glow as this," said Irene, "forebodes great heat, storms,
and perhaps heavy rain, so the gatekeeper says; and he is always with the
astrologers who observe the stars and the signs in the heavens from the
towers near the temple-gates. He is poor little Philo's father.
I wanted to bring Klea with me, for she knows more about our parents than