Christian priest. They were standing at the door of a large house; and
close to the wall, in the shadow of the porch of a building opposite,
stood a youth, his hair covered by the hood of a long caracalla,
listening with breathless attention.

This was Alexander.

He had been standing here for some time already, waiting for the return
of Agatha, the fair Christian whom he had followed across the lake, and
who had vanished into that house under the guidance of a deaconess.
The door had not long closed on them when several men had also been
admitted, whom he could not distinguish in the darkness, for the street
was narrow and the moon still low.

It was sheer folly--and yet he fancied that one of them was his father,
for his deep, loud voice was precisely like that of Heron; and, what was
even more strange, that of the man who answered him seemed to proceed
from his brother Philip. But, at such an hour, he could more easily have
supposed them to be on the top of Mount Etna than in this quarter of the
town.

The impatient painter was very tired of waiting, so, seating himself on
a feeding-manger for asses which stood in front of the adjoining house,
he presently fell asleep. He was tired from the sleepless night he had
last spent, and when he opened his eyes once more and looked down the
street into which the moon was now shining, he did not know how long
he had been slumbering. Perhaps the damsel he wanted to see had already
left the house, and he must see her again, cost him what it might; for
she was so amazingly like the dead Korinna whom he had painted, that
he could not shake off the notion that perhaps--for, after Serapion's
discourse, it seemed quite likely--perhaps he had seen the spirit of the
departed girl.

He had had some difficulty in persuading Glaukias, who had come
across the lake with him, to allow him to follow up the fair vision
unaccompanied; and his entreaties and prohibitions would probably alike
have proved vain, but that Glaukias held taken it into his head to show
his latest work, which a slave was carrying, to some friends over a jar
of wine. It was a caricature of Caesar, whom he had seen at the Kanopic
Gate, modeled while he was in the house of Polybius, with a few happy
touches.

When Alexander woke, he crept into the shadow of the porch opposite to
the house into which Korinna's double had disappeared, and he now had no
lack of entertainment. A man came out of the tall white house an