If to amuse or forget himself he had caroused far more nights in succession in Alexandria, why should he not keep awake when the object in question was to wrest a young life from the grasp of death?  This man and his life were now his highest goal, and he had never yet repented his foolish eccentricity of imposing discomforts upon himself to help the suffering.

Bias, on his part, was very willing to go to rest.  He had plenty of cause for weariness; Myrtilus’s unscrupulous body-servant had stolen off with the other slaves the night before, and did not return, with staggering gait, until the next morning, but, in order to keep his promise to his master, he had scarcely closed his eyes, that he might be at hand if Myrtilus should need assistance.

So Bias fell asleep quickly enough in his little room in the lower story, while his master, by the exertion of all his strength of will, watched beside the couch of the Gaul.

Yet, after the first quarter of an hour, his head, no matter how he struggled to prevent it, drooped again and again upon his breast.  But just as slumber was completely overpowering him his patient made him start up, for he had left his bed, and when Hermon, fully roused, looked for him, was standing in the middle of the room, gazing about him.

The artist thought that fever had driven the wounded warrior from his couch, as it formerly did his fellow-pupil Lycon, whom, in the delirium of typhus, he could keep in bed only by force.  So he led the Gaul carefully back to the couch he had deserted, and, after moistening the bandage with healing balm from Myrtilus’s medicine chest, ordered him to keep quiet.

The barbarian yielded as obediently as a child, but at first remained in a sitting posture and asked, in scarcely intelligible broken Greek, how he came to this place.

After Hermon had satisfied his curiosity, he also put a few questions, and learned that his charge not only wore a mustache, like his fellow countrymen, but also a full beard, because the latter was the badge of the bridge builders, to which class he belonged.  While examining the one crossing the canal, it had fallen in upon him.

He closed his eyes as he spoke, and Hermon wondered if it was not time for him to lie down also; but the wounded man’s brow was still burning, and the Gallic words which he constantly muttered were probably about the phantoms of fever, which Hermon recognised from Lycon’s illness.

So he resolved to wait and continue to devote the night, which he had already intended to give him, to the sufferer.  From the chair at the foot of the bed he looked directly into his face.  The soft light of the lamp, which with two others hung from a tall, heavy bronze stand in the shape of an anchor, which Bias had brought, shone brightly enough to allow him to perceive how powerful was the man whose life he had saved.  His own face was scarcely lighter in hue than the barbarian’s, and how sharp was the contrast between his long, thick black beard and his white face and bare arched chest!