Or how had it happened that, though his heart was Daphne's, and hers
alone, he had felt wounded and insulted when his Bias, who was leaning
over the railing of the deck yonder, gazing at the glittering waves, had
informed him that Ledscha had been accompanied in her flight from her
unloved husband by the Gaul whose life he, Hermon, had saved? Was this
due to jealousy or merely wounded vanity at being supplanted in a heart
which he firmly believed belonged, though only in bitter hate, solely to
him?

She certainly had not forgotten him, and while the remembrance of her
blended with the yearning for Daphne which never left him, he sat down
and gazed out into the darkness till his head drooped on his breast.

Then a dream showed the Biamite to the slumbering man, yet no longer in
the guise of a woman, but as the spider Arachne. She increased before
his eyes to an enormous size and alighted upon the pharos erected by
Sostratus. Uninjured by the flames of the lighthouse, above which she
hovered, she wove a net of endlessly long gray threads over the whole
city of Alexandria, with its temples, palaces, and halls, harbours and
ships, until Daphne suddenly appeared with a light step and quietly cut
one after the other.

Suddenly a shrill whistle aroused him. It was the signal of the flute-
player to relieve the rowers.

A faint yellow line was now tingeing the eastern horizon of the gray,
cloudy sky. At his left extended the flat, dull-brown coast line, which
seemed to be lower than the turbid waves of the restless sea. The cold
morning wind was blowing light mists over the absolutely barren shore.
Not a tree, not a bush, not a human dwelling was to be seen in this