For Cynthia had suddenly stopped, and, throwing her large crimson satchel to her maid, she skirted the marble basin of the fountain with swift steps. “I see! I see!” exclaimed the young man; “a little child is dangerously near the brink of the fountain--and----” He said no more, but sprang across the emerald turf to the edge of the deep marble basin, where the clear waters were gently rocking on their breast the broad leaves of the water-lily, already showing their snowy heads from the thick green calyx. But the waters suddenly became disturbed by something more than the gentle fall of the jets of the fountain. They were swollen into little wavelets, and as the two elder men reached the spot they heard a cry, and saw Heraclitus plunge into the basin, which was some six feet in depth, and some two hundred feet in circumference. “My mistress plunged in to save a child who had fallen into the water,” exclaimed Cynthia’s attendant. “Ah me! Ah me! Will she be drowned?” Then the girl, after the fashion of such maidens in every time, uttered a long and piercing shriek, which brought to the spot a good many of those who were wandering about in the Museum gardens on this early spring morning. Claudius’s face was blanched with horror, and he clutched the arm of his friend Varrus for support. “Be of good courage,” Varrus said; “my son has rescued both the child and the maiden. See! they are already safe!” “Yes, dear Claudius,” Cynthia struggled to say, as, breathlessly, and her clothes heavy with water, Claudius bent anxiously over her. “Yes, safe; and the little child--is he safe?” “Thanks to your noble efforts, fair lady,” Heraclitus said, “no harm is done. Hearken!” And a loud scream from the little boy, as his mother, who carelessly allowed him to stray too near the edge of the fountain, clasped him frantically to her breast, testified to the truth of the young man’s words. “It is all well, then. Nay, good Claudius, do not be frightened. I will go home now, and change my wet garments. Ah! look at my poor handkerchief; see, the gold border is spoiled.” She said this with childlike earnestness, and then, helped to her feet by Varrus, she said-- “Who is my father, Casca, to thank for coming to my rescue? You, too, brave sir, will need change of garments. Claudius, do bid my deliverer to come to our house.” Cynthia was fighting against a feeling of faintness and exhaustion which the sudden plunge into the water had caused; and Heraclitus was quite forgetting his own share in the rescue of the child, in the admiration he felt for the beautiful maiden who had so promptly gone to save the child’s life. “Come home with us,” Claudius said, in a tremulous voice; “come home, and let my friend Casca and me show our gratitude. Our greatest treasure has been in peril, and we owe her preservation to you.”