After his greeting, she pointed to her deaf ear and begged him to speak louder. At the same time she gazed into his eyes with a keen, penetrating glance, and interrupted him by the question: “The Greek sculptor whose studio was burned over his head? And blind? Blind still?” “In both eyes,” Bias answered for his master. “And you, fellow?” the old dame asked; then, recollecting herself, stopped the reply on the servant’s lips with the hasty remark: “You are the blackbeard’s slave--a Biamite? Oh, I remember perfectly! You disappeared with the burning house.” Then she gazed intently and thoughtfully from one to the other, and at last, pointing to Bias, muttered in a whisper: “You alone come from Hanno and Ledscha, and were with them on the Hydra? Very well. What news have you for the old woman from the young couple?” The freedman began to relate what brought him to the Owl’s Nest, and the gray-haired crone listened eagerly until he said that Ledscha lived unhappily with her husband, and therefore had left him. She sent back to her, as the head of Hanno’s family, the bridal dowry with which Hanno had bought her from her father as his wife. Then Tabus struggled into a little more erect posture, and asked: “What does this mean? Five talents--and gold, not silver talents? And she sends the money to me? To me? And she ran away from her husband? But no--no! Once more--you are a Biamite--repeat it in our own language--and loudly. This ear is the better one.” Bias obeyed, and the old dame listened to the end without interrupting him: then raising her brown right hand, covered with a network of blue-black veins, she clinched it into a fist, which she shook far more violently than Bias would have believed possible in her weak condition. At the same time she pressed her lips so tightly together that her toothless mouth deepened into a hole, and her dim eyes shone with a keen, menacing light. For some time she found no reply, though strange, rattling, gasping sounds escaped her heaving breast. At last she succeeded in uttering words, and shrieked shrilly: “This--this--away with the golden trash! With the bridal dowry of the family rejected, and once more free, the base fool thinks she would be like the captive fox that gnawed the rope! Oh, this age, these people! And this, this is the haughty, strong Ledscha, the daughter of the Biamites, who--there stands the blind girl--deceiver!--who so admirably avenged herself?” Here her voice failed, and Hermon began to speak to assure her that she understood Ledscha’s wish aright. Then he asked her for a token by which she acknowledged the receipt of the gold, which he handed her in a stout linen bag.