“I will not interrupt you again, I assure you,” said Melissa. “Well, well,” said her brother. “There is not much that is pleasant left to tell. Where was I?” “Painting, so long as it was light--” “To be sure--I remember. It began to grow dark. Then lamps were brought in, large ones, and as many as I wished for. Just before sunset Seleukus, Korinna’s father, came in to look upon his daughter once more. He bore his grief with dignified composure; yet by his child’s bier he found it hard to be calm. But you can imagine all that. He invited me to eat, and the food they brought might have tempted a full man to excess, but I could only swallow a few mouthfuls. Berenike--the mother--did not even moisten her lips, but Seleukus did duty for us both, and this I could see displeased his wife. During supper the merchant made many inquiries about me and my father; for he had heard Philip’s praises from his brother Theophilus, the high-priest. I learned from him that Korinna had caught her sickness from a slave girl she had nursed, and had died of the fever in three days. But while I sat listening to him, as he talked and ate, I could not keep my eyes off his wife who reclined opposite to me silent and motionless, for the gods had created Korinna in her very image. The lady Berenike’s eyes indeed sparkle with a lurid, I might almost say an alarming, fire, but they are shaped like Korinna’s. I said so, and asked whether they were of the same color; I wanted to know for my portrait. On this Seleukus referred me to a picture painted by old Sosibius, who has lately gone to Rome to work in Caesar’s new baths. He last year painted the wall of a room in the mer chant’s country house at Kanopus. In the center of the picture stands Galatea, and I know it now to be a good and true likeness. “The picture I finished that evening is to be placed at the head of the young girl’s sarcophagus; but I am to keep it two days longer, to reproduce a second likeness more at my leisure, with the help of the Galatea, which is to remain in Seleukus’s town house. “Then he left me alone with his wife. “What a delightful commission! I set to work with renewed pleasure, and more composure than at first. I had no need to hurry, for the first picture is to be hidden in the tomb, and I could give all my care to the second. Besides, Korinna’s features were indelibly impressed on my eye. “I generally can not paint at all by lamp-light; but this time I found no difficulty, and I soon recovered that blissful, solemn mood which I had felt in the presence of the dead. Only now and then it was clouded by a sigh, or a faint moan from Berenike: ‘Gone, gone! There is no comfort--none, none!’ “And what could I answer? When did Death ever give back what he has snatched away?