g the
summons of the most powerful man south of the Mediterranean.

A curtain hung across the door of the inner chamber, through which
Philammon could hear plainly the steps of some one walking up and down
hurriedly and fiercely.

'They will drive me to it!' at last burst out a deep sonorous voice.
'They will drive me to it.... Their blood be on their own head! It
is not enough for them to blaspheme God and His church, to have the
monopoly of all the cheating, fortune-telling, usury, sorcery, and
coining of the city, but they must deliver my clergy into the hands of
the tyrant?'

'It was so even in the apostles' time,' suggested a softer but far more
unpleasant voice.

'Then it shall be so no longer! God has given me the power to stop
them; and God do so to me, and more also, if I do not use that power.
To-morrow I sweep out this Augean stable of villainy, and leave not a
Jew to blaspheme and cheat in Alexandria.'

'I am afraid such a judgment, however righteous, might offend his
excellency.'

'His excellency! His tyranny! Why does Orestes truckle to these
circumcised, but because they lend money to him and to his creatures? He
would keep up a den of fiends in Alexandria if they would do as much for
him! And then to play them off against me and mine, to bring religion
into contempt by setting the mob together by the ears, and to end with
outrages like this! Seditious! Have they not cause enough? The sooner
I remove one of their temptations the better: let the other tempter
beware, lest his judgment be at hand!'

'The prefect, your holiness?' asked the other voice slily.

'Who spoke of the prefect? Whosoever is a tyrant, and a murderer, and an
oppressor of the poor, and a favourer of the philosophy which despises
and enslaves the poor, should not he perish, though he be seven times a
prefect?'

At this juncture Philammon, thinking perhaps that he had already heard
too much, notified his presence by some slight noise, at which the
secretary, as he seemed to be, hastily lifted the curtain, and somewhat
sharply demanded his business. The names of Pambo and Arsenius, however,
seemed to pacify him at once; and the trembling youth was ushered into
the presence of him who in reality, though not in name, sat on the
throne of the Pharaohs.

Not, indeed, in their outward pomp; the furniture of the chamber was
but a grade above that of the artisan's; the dress of the great man was
coarse and simple; if personal vanity