one companion, one kindly voice, might
have delivered them. I have known those, too, who have been so puffed up
by those very penances which were meant to humble them, that they have
despised all means of grace, as though they were already perfect, and
refusing even the Holy Eucharist, have lived in self-glorying dreams
and visions suggested by the evil spirits. One such I knew, who, in
the madness? of his pride, refused to be counselled by any mortal
man--saying that he would call no man master: and what befell him? He
who used to pride himself on wandering a day's journey into the desert
without food or drink, who boasted that he could sustain life for three
months at a time only on wild herbs and the Blessed Bread, seized with
an inward fire, fled from his cell back to the theatres, the circus, and
the taverns, and ended his miserable days in desperate gluttony, holding
all things to be but phantasms, denying his own existence, and that of
God Himself.'

Arsenius shook his head.

'Be it so. But my case is different. I have yet more to confess, my
friend. Day by day I am more and more haunted by the remembrance of
that world from which I fled. I know that if I returned I should feel
no pleasure in those pomps, which, even while I battened on them, I
despised. Can I hear any more the voice of singing men and singing
women; or discern any longer what I eat or what I drink? And yet--the
palaces of those seven hills, their statesmen and their generals, their
intrigues, their falls, and their triumphs--for they might rise and
conquer yet!--for no moment are they out of my imagination,-no moment in
which they are not tempting me back to them, like a moth to the candle
which has already scorched him, with a dreadful spell, which I must at
last obey, wretch that I am, against my own will, or break by fleeing
into some outer desert, from whence return will be impossible!'

Pambo smiled.

'Again, I say, this is the worldly-wise man, the searcher of hearts! And
he would fain flee from the little Laura, which does turn his thoughts
at times from such vain dreams, to a solitude where he will be utterly
unable to escape those dreams. Well, friend!--and what if thou art
troubled at times by anxieties and schemes for this brother and for
that? Better to be anxious for others than only for thyself. Better to
have something to love--even something to weep over--than to become in
some lonely cavern thine own world,--perhaps, as more