polished surface of the dark marble. The thick sandals she had tied on
to her feet roused loud echoes in the empty rooms as they fell on the
stone pavements, and terror possessed Selene's anxious soul. Her fingers
trembled as they held the lamp and her heart beat audibly as, with bated
breath, she went through the cupolaed hall in which Ptolemy Euergetes
'the fat' was said, some years ago, to have murdered his own son, and in
which even a deep breath roused an echo.

But even in this room she did not forget to look to the right and left
for her father. She breathed a sigh of relief when she perceived a
streak of light which shone through the gaping rift of a cracked side-
door of the hall of the Muses and fell in a broken reflection on the
floor and the wall of the last room through which she had to pass. She
now entered the large hall which was dimly lighted by the lamps behind
the sculptor's screen, and by several tapers, now burnt down low. These
were standing on a table knocked together out of blocks of wood and
planks at the extreme end of the hall, and behind this her father was
sound asleep.

The deep notes brought out of the sleeper's broad chest, were echoed in a
very uncanny way from the bare walls of the vast empty room, and she was
frightened by them and still more by the long black shadows of the
pillars, that lay, like barriers, across her path. She stood listening
in the middle of the hall and soon recognized in the alarming tones a
sound that was only too familiar. Without a moment's hesitation she
started to run, and hastened to the sleeper, shook him, pushed him,
called him, sprinkled his forehead with water, and appealed to him by the
tenderest names with which her sister Arsinoe was wont to coax him.
When, in spite of all this, he neither spoke nor stirred, she flung the
full light of the lamp on his face. Then she thought she perceived that