of being a great Queen, stronger and wiser than her husband,
but fierce, vindictive, and unbending, a firm support to her friends,
but a terror to her foes. This was the woman to whom the Abbot Luke of
Antioch was bringing Leon, her forgotten son. If ever her mind strayed
back to the days when, abandoned by her lover Ecebolus, the Governor of
the African Pentapolis, she had made her way on foot through Asia Minor,
and left her infant with the monks, it was only to persuade herself that
the brethren cloistered far from the world would never identify Theodora
the Empress with Theodora the dissolute wanderer, and that the fruits of
her sin would be for ever concealed from her Imperial husband.

The little brig had now rounded the point of the Acropolis, and the long
blue stretch of the Golden Horn lay before it. The high wall of
Theodosius lined the whole harbour, but a narrow verge of land had been
left between it and the water's edge to serve as a quay. The vessel ran
alongside near the Neorion Gate, and the passengers, after a short
scrutiny from the group of helmeted guards who lounged beside it, were
allowed to pass through into the great city.

The abbot, who had made several visits to Constantinople upon the
business of his monastery, walked with the assured step of one who knows
his ground; while the boy, alarmed and yet pleased by the rush of
people, the roar and clatter of passing chariots, and the vista of
magnificent buildings, held tightly to the loose gown of his guide,
while staring eagerly about him in every direction. Passing through the
steep and narrow streets which led up from the water, they emerged into
the open space which surrounds the magnificent pile of Saint Sophia, the
great church begun by Constantine, hallowed by Saint Chrysostom, and now
the seat of the Patriarch, and the very centre of the Eastern Church.
Only with many crossings and genuflections did the pious abbot succeed
in passing the revered shrine of his religion, and hurried on to his
difficult task.

Having passed Saint Sophia, the two travellers crossed the marble-paved
Augusteum, and saw upon their right the gilded gates of the hippodrome
through which a vast crowd of people was pressing, for though the
morning had been devoted to the religious ceremony, the afternoon was
given over to secular festivities. So great was the rush of the
populace that the two strangers had some difficulty in disengaging
themselves from the stream a