I let go my clutch on the rock and tried to stand up. I did succeed in kneeling up, supported by my hand on the altar stone. So half erect I looked round. Agathemer lay under the intruder, who had him by the throat with both hands. Partly by sight, even from behind him, partly by the objurgation which he panted out, I recognized Chryseros Philargyrus and realized that he thought that Agathemer had been torturing me in revenge for his flogging at Nemestronia's. I instantly forgot my plight and my natural instincts asserted themselves. As if I had been then what I had been ten days before, I ordered Chryseros to loose Agathemer and he obeyed me, as if I had been what I felt myself, his master. He and Agathemer stood up and looked at me and each other: I must have made a laughable spectacle, swaying as I knelt, my hands on the rock, my hair and beard mere clipped stubble, and I naked, with my back bleeding and both shoulders and one hip inflamed, purple-red and puffy. Certainly both Chryseros and Agathemer appeared comical to me, even in my pain and misery and weakness and through the enveloping horror of my fever. Agathemer, his hair and beard a worse stubble than mine, was gasping and ruefully rubbing his throat, making a ridiculous figure in his brown tunic, patched with patches of red, yellow and blue, all sewed on with white thread. Chryseros was panting, and his bald head shone in the sun. He had cast off his cloak as he rushed at Agathemer and stood only in his rusty brown tunic, himself as dry and lean as a dead limb of a tree. Although he had obeyed instantly when I ordered him to loose Agathemer, yet, perhaps from some vagary of my fever, I stared at Chryseros without any other feeling than that he had been for most of his life the tenant of our family enemy. As I looked at him I felt utterly lost, as if there was now no hope for me, as if Chryseros would certainly betray me to the authorities. I felt utterly despairing and totally reckless. This mood, oddly enough, urged me to do the very best thing I could have done. Either from right instinct or delirious folly, I informed Chryseros fully of our purposes, doings and plans. He apologized to Agathemer for his assault on him, affirmed his complete loyalty to me and promised all possible assistance and perfect secrecy. He examined me and said: "I'll have your wounds clean, your back dried up, every inch of you healing properly and your fever cooled before morning. Here, Agathemer, help get him abed." They washed my back and laid me, naked as I was, on the quilt laid over the bed of leaves, then they covered me with the other quilt. "You two keep close till I come back," Chryseros advised. "Someone else might use this path. I'll be back soon and I'll arrange to excite no suspicion."