emetrius
gravely. "Persuade him to love, to believe, to hope in the creed you
force upon him; but do not rob him of what he trusts in before he is
prepared to accept the substitute you offer him.--Now, let me go; we
are neither of us in the temper to make the best arrangements for the
future. One thing, at any rate, is certain: I have nothing more to do
with the estate."

CHAPTER VI.

After leaving his stepmother Demetrius made good use of his time and
dictated a number of letters to his secretary, a slave he had brought
with him to Alexandria, for the use of the pen was to him unendurable
labor. The letters were on business, relating to his departure from
Cyrenaica and his purpose of managing his own estates for the future,
and when they lay before him, finished, rolled up and sealed, he felt
that he had come to a mile-stone on his road, a landmark in his life. He
paced the room in silence, trying to picture to himself the fate of
the slaves and peasants who, for so many years, had been his faithful
servants and fellow-laborers, whose confidence he had entirely won, and
many of whom he truly loved. But he could not conceive of their life,
their toil or their festivals, bereft of images, offerings, garlands,
and hymns of rejoicing. To him they were as children, forbidden to laugh
and play, and he could not help once more recurring to his boyhood and
the day of his going to school, when, instead of running and shouting in
his father's sunny garden, he had been made to sit still and silent in
a dull class-room. And now had the whole world reached such a boundary
line in existence beyond which there was to be no more freedom and
careless joy--where a ceaseless struggle for higher things must begin
and never end?

If the Gospel were indeed true, and if all it promised could ever find
fulfilment, it might perhaps be prudent to admit the sinfulness of man
and to give up the joys and glories of this world to win the eternal
treasure that it described. Many a good and wise man whom he had
known--nay the Emperor, the great and learned Theodosius himself--was
devoted heart and soul to the Christian faith, and Demetrius knew
from his own experience that his mother's creed, in which he had been
initiated as a boy and from which his father, after holding him at the
font had perverted him at an early age, offered great consolations and
enduring help to those whose existence was one of care, poverty,
and suffering. But his l