scord among their ranks, the Pagans
sent to the Primate an assurance of their acceptance of his terms,
which were that both parties should abstain from any further struggle
for the ascendancy until an edict from Theodosius determining the
ultimate fate of the temple should be applied for and obtained.

The truce once agreed on, the wide space before the respited edifice
was gradually cleared of its occupants. Slowly and sadly the
Archbishop and his followers departed from the ancient walls whose
summits they had assaulted in vain; and when the sun went down, of the
great multitude congregated in the morning a few corpses were all that
remained. Within the sacred building, Death and Repose ruled with the
night, where morning had brightly glittered on Life and Action. The
wounded, the wearied, and the cold, all now lay hushed alike, fanned by
the night breezes that wandered through the lofty porticoes, or soothed
by the obscurity that reigned over the silent halls. Among the ranks
of the Pagan devotees but one man still toiled and thought. Round and
round the temple, restless as a wild beast that is threatened in his
lair, watchful as a lonely spirit in a city of strange tombs, wandered
the solitary and brooding Ulpius. For him there was no rest of
body--no tranquility of mind. On the events of the next few days
hovered the fearful chance that was soon, either for misery or
happiness, to influence irretrievably the years of his future life.
Round and round the mighty walls he watched with mechanical and useless
anxiety. Every stone in the building was eloquent to his lonely
heart--beautiful to his wild imagination. On those barren structures
stretched for him the loved and fertile home; there was the shrine for
whose glory his intellect had been enslaved, for whose honour his youth
had been sacrificed! Round and round the secret recesses and sacred
courts he paced with hurried footstep, cleansing with gentle and
industrious hand the stains of blood and the defilements of warfare
from the statues at his side. Sad, solitary, thoughtful, as in the
first days of his apprenticeship to the gods, he now roved in the same
moonlit recesses where Macrinus had taught him in his youth. As the
menacing tumults of the day had aroused his fierceness, so the
stillness of the quiet night awakened his gentleness. He had combated
for the temple in the morning as a son for a parent, and he now watched
over it at night as a miser ove