"I am to play Pallas Athene to your Perseus," she said, and it seemed to him for a moment that she was in a mood to jest at heroics.

"If you mean that I regard you as my goddess, I am well content," he answered quickly.

"Ah, but wait. Pallas Athene came to Perseus in a dream, and let us make believe that we are dreaming now. She had great gray eyes, clear and piercing, and she knew all thoughts of men's hearts and the secrets of their souls. My eyes are not gray, Alec, nor can they pierce as hers; but I can borrow her beautiful words, and tell you that she turns her face from the creatures of clay. They may 'fatten at ease like sheep in the pasture, and eat what they did not sow, like oxen in the stall. They grow and spread, like the gourd along the ground; but, like the gourd, they give no shade to the traveler, and when they are ripe death gathers them, and they go down unloved into hell, and their name vanishes out of the land.' But to the souls of fire she gives more fire, and to those who are manful she gives a power more than man's. These are her heroes, the sons of the Immortals. They are blest, but not as the men who live at ease. She drives them forth 'by strange paths ... through [Pg 17]doubt and need and danger and battle.... Some of them are slain in the flower of their youth, no man knows when or where, and some of them win noble names and a fair and green old age.' Not even the goddess herself can tell the hap that shall befall them; for each man's lot is known only to Zeus. Have you reflected well on these things, Alec? Be sure of yourself! There may be Gorgons to encounter, and monsters of the deep."

[Pg 17]

He came very near to her. Her eyes were glistening. For one glowing second they looked into each other's hearts.

"And perhaps a maiden chained to a rock to be rescued," he whispered.

Then she drew herself up proudly. "Do not forget that I am Pallas Athene," she said. "My shield of brass is an easel and my mighty spear a mahl-stick; but—I keep to my rôle, Alec."

He longed to clasp her in his arms; but it flashed upon him with an inspiration from topmost Olympus that, all unwittingly, she had bound herself to his fortunes.

"Then I leave it at that," he said quietly.

This sudden air of confidence was bewildering. She had been swept off her feet by emotion, and the very considerations she thought she had conquered were now tugging at 

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