“And for that very reason,” replied the high-priest, “they are often singularly easy to deceive by your skill, since, seeing an effect without a cause, they are inclined to regard the invisible cause as something supersensual.  Now, open the door again and let us get out by the side door; do you, this time, undertake the task of cooperating with Serapis yourself.  Consider that Philometor will not confirm the donation of the land unless he quits the temple deeply penetrated by the greatness of our god.  Would it be possible, do you think, to have the new censer ready in time for the birthday of King Euergetes, which is to be solemnly kept at Memphis?”

“We will see,” replied Krates, “I must first put together the lock of the great door of the tomb of Apis, for so long as I have it in my workshop any one can open it who sticks a nail into the hole above the bar, and any one can shut it inside who pushes the iron bolt.  Send to call me before the performance with the lights begins; I will come in spite of my wretched feet.  As I have undertaken the thing I will carry it out, but for no other reason, for it is my opinion that even without such means of deception—­”

“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 raised, we see to be wrinkled and devoid of charm.