who was a good lawyer as
well as a just man, had not only left them unmolested, but in spite of
his fears--during the last few years--for his own safety, had shown
himself no respecter of persons by defending their rights firmly and
resolutely against the powerful patriarch of the Jacobite Church. The
Senate of the ancient capital naturally, approved his course, and had not
merely suffered the heretic Sisterhood to remain, but had helped and
encouraged it.

The Jacobite clergy of the city shut their eyes, and only opened them to
watch the convent at Easter-tide; for on the Saturday before Easter, the
nuns, in obedience to an agreement made before the Monophysite Schism,
were required to pay a tribute of embroidered vestments to the head of
the Christian Churches, with wine of the best vintages of Kochome near
the Pyramid of steps, and a considerable quantity of flowers and
confectionary. So the ancient coenobium of women was maintained, and
though all Egypt was by this time Jacobite or Moslem, and many of the
older Sisters had departed this life within the last year, no one had
thought of enquiring how it was that the number of the nuns remained
still the same, till the Jacobite archbishop Benjamin filled the
patriarchal throne of Alexandria in the place of the Melchite Cyrus.

To Benjamin the heretical Sisters at Memphis--the hawks in a dove-cote,
as he called them--were an offence, and he thought that the deed might
bear a new interpretation: that as there was no longer a Christian
emperor, and as the word "Christian" was used in the document, if the
convent were broken up the property should pass into the hands of the
only Christian magnate then existing in the country: himself, namely, and
his Church. The ill-feeling which the Patriarch fostered against the
Mukaukas had been aggravated to hostility by their antagonism on this
matter.

A musical dirge now fell on Paula's ear from the convent chapel. Was the
worthy Mother Superior dead? No, this lament must be for some other
death, for the strange skirling wail of the Egyptian women came up to her
corner window from the road, from the bridge, and from the boats on the
river. No Jacobite of Memphis would have dared to express her grief so
publicly for the death of a Melchite; and as the chorus of voices
swelled, the thought struck her with a chill that it must be her uncle
and friend who had closed his weary eyes in death.

It was with deep emotion and many tears