The time allowed had expired.

Hermon again warmly embraced Daphne, saying:  “Then go!  Nothing can cloud what these brief moments have bestowed.  I must remain blind; but you have restored the lost sight to my poor darkened soul.  To-morrow I shall stand in the palaestra before my comrades, and explain to them what a malicious accident deceived me, and with me this whole great city.  Many will not believe me, and even your father will perhaps consider it a disgrace to give his arm to his scorned, calumniated nephew to guide him home.  Bring this before your mind, and everything else that you must accept with it, if you consent, when the time arrives, to become mine.  Conceal and palliate nothing!  But should the Lady Thyone speak of the Eumenides who pursued me, tell her that they had probably again extended their arms toward me, but when I return to-morrow from the palaestra I shall be freed from the terrible beings.”

Lastly, he asked to be told quickly how she had happened to come to the palace at the right time at so late an hour, and Daphne informed him as briefly and modestly as if the hazardous venture which, in strong opposition to her retiring, womanly nature, she had undertaken, was a mere matter of course.

When Thyone in her presence heard from Gras that Hermon intended to go to Proclus’s banquet, she started up in horror, exclaiming, “Then the unfortunate man is lost!”

Her husband, who had long trusted even the gravest secrets to his discreet old wife, had informed her of the terrible office the King had confided to him.  All the male guests of Proclus were to be executed; the women—­the Queen at their head—­would be sent into exile.

Then Daphne, on her knees, besought the matron to tell her what threatened Hermon, and succeeded in persuading her to speak.

The terrified girl, accompanied by Gras, went first to her lover’s house and, when she did not find him there, hastened to the King’s palace.

If Hermon could have seen her with her fluttering hair, dishevelled by the night breeze, and checks blanched by excitement and terror, if he had been told how she struggled with Thyone, who tried to detain her and lock her up before she left her father’s house, he would have perceived with still prouder joy, had that been possible, what he possessed in the devoted love of this true woman.

Grateful and moved by joyous hopes, he informed Daphne of the words of the oracle, which had imprinted themselves upon his memory.

She, too, quickly retained them, and murmured softly: 

“Noise and dazzling radiance are hostile to the purer light, Morning and day will rise quietly from the starving sand.”

What could the verse mean except that the blind man would regain the power to behold the light of clay amid the sands of the silent desert?

Perhaps it would be well for him to leave Alexandria now, and she described how much benefit she had received while hunting from the silence of the wilderness, when she had left the noise of the city behind her.  But before she had quite finished, the knocking at the door was repeated.