or?"

Callista seldom lost her self-possession; for a moment she lost it now;
tears gushed from her eyes. "Impossible!" she said, "what, I? you do not
know me, father!" She paused, and then resumed in a different tone, "No!
_my_ lot is one way, yours another. I am a child of Greece, and have no
happiness but that, such as it is, which my own bright land, my own
glorious race, give me. I may well be content, I may well be resigned, I
may well be proud, if I possess _that_ happiness. I must live and die
where I have been born. I am a tree which will not bear transplanting. The
Assyrians, the Jews, the Egyptians, have their own mystical teaching. They
follow their happiness in their own way; mine is a different one. The
pride of mind, the revel of the intellect, the voice and eyes of genius,
and the fond beating heart, I cannot do without them. I cannot do without
what you, Christian, call sin. Let me alone; such as nature made me I will
be. I cannot change."

This sudden revulsion of her feelings quite overcame Caecilius; yet, while
the disappointment thrilled through him, he felt a most strange sympathy
for the poor lost girl, and his reply was full of emotion. "Am _I_ a Jew?"
he exclaimed; "am _I_ an Egyptian, or an Assyrian? Have I from my youth
believed and possessed what now is my Life, my Hope, and my Love? Child,
_what_ was once my life? Am not _I_ too a brand plucked out of the fire?
Do _I_ deserve anything but evil? Is it not the Power, the Mighty Power of
the only Strong, the only Merciful, the grace of Emmanuel, which has
changed and won me? If He can change me, an old man, could He not change a
child like you? I, a proud, stern Roman; I, a lover of pleasure, a man of
letters, of political station, with formed habits, and life-long
associations, and complicated relations; was it _I_ who wrought this great
change in me, who gained for myself the power of hating what I once loved,
of unlearning what I once knew, nay, of even forgetting what once I was?
Who has made you and me to differ, but He who can, when He will, make us
to agree? It is His same Omnipotence which will transform _you_, if you
will but come to be transformed."

But a reaction had come over the proud and sensitive mind of the Greek
girl. "So after all, priest," she said, "you are but a man like others; a
frail, guilty person like myself. I can find plenty of persons who do as I
do; I want some one who does not; I want some one to worship. I thou