ious heights and the darkest depths of life and
feeling. If a man may stake his whole existence and powers for anything,
surely it is for his own house."

"And you have honestly done so for ours!" cried Dorothea.

"For ours," repeated Petrus, giving the words the strongest accent of
his deep voice. "Two are stronger than one, and it is long since we
ceased to say 'I' in discussing any question concerning the house or the
children; and both have been touched by to-day's events."

"The senate will not support you in constructing the road?"

"No, the bishop gave the casting-vote. I need not tell you how we stand
towards each other, and I will not blame him; for he is a just man, but
in many things we can never meet half-way. You know that he was in
his youth a soldier, and his very piety is rough--I might almost say
warlike. If we had yielded to his views, and if our head man Obedianus
had not supported me, we should not have had a single picture in the
church, and it would have looked like a barn rather than a house of
prayer. We never have understood each other, and since I opposed his
wish of making Polykarp a priest, and sent the boy to learn of the
sculptor Thalassius--for even as a child he drew better than many
masters in these wretched days that produce no great artists--since
then, I say, he speaks of me as if I were a heathen--"

"And yet he esteems you highly, that I know," interrupted Dame Dorothea.

"I fully return his good opinion," replied Petrus, "and it is no
ordinary matter that estranges. He thinks that he only holds the true
faith, and ought to fight for it; he calls all artistic work a heathen
abomination; he never felt the purifying influence of the beautiful, and
regards all pictures and statues as tending to idolatry. Still he allows
himself to admire Polykarp's figures of angels and the Good Shepherd,
but the lions put the old warrior in a rage. 'Accursed idols and works
of the devil,' are what he calls them."

"But there were lions even in the temple of Solomon," cried Dorothea.

"I urged that, and also that in the schools of the catechists, and in
the educational history of animals which we possess and teach from, the
Saviour himself is compared to a lion, and that Mark, the evangelist,
who brought the doctrine of the gospel to Alexandria, is represented
with a lion. But he withstood me more and more violently, saying that
Polykarp's works were to adorn no sacred place, but the Caesareum,