r had she gone through such anguish of soul as by his bed of
suffering, and yet she could not help gazing at his face; and when she
told herself that he must soon be no more, that the light of his eyes
would cease to shine on hers, she felt as though the sun were about
to be extinguished and the earth darkened for all time. However, his
healthy vigor kept him lingering for many days and nights.

On the last evening of his life he took Agne for a Muse, and calling to
her to come to him seized her hand and sank back unconscious, never to
move again. She stood there as the minutes slowly passed, waiting in
agonized suspense till his hand should be cold in hers; and as she
waited she overheard a dialogue between two deaconesses who were
watching by a sleeping patient. One of them was telling the other that
her sister's husband, a mason, had died an obdurate heathen and a bitter
enemy of the Christian Church. Then Dorothea, his widow, had devoted
herself to saving his soul; she left her children, abandoning them to
the charity of the congregation, and had withdrawn to a cloister to
pray in silence and unceasingly for the soul of her deceased husband.
At first he used to appear to her in her dreams, with furious gestures,
accompanied by centaurs and goat-footed creatures, and had desired her
to go home to her children and leave his soil in peace, for that he was
in very good quarters with the jolly devils; but soon after she had
seen him again with scorched limbs, and he lead implored her to pray
fervently for mercy on him, for that they were torturing him cruelly in
hell.

Dorothea had then retired into the desert of Kolzoum where she was still
living in a cave, feeding on herbs, roots, and shell-fish thrown up on
the sea-shore. She had schooled herself to do without sleep, and prayed
day and night for her husband's soul; and she lead obtained strength
never to think of anything but her own and her husband's salvation, and
to forget her children completely. Her fervid devotion had at length met
with full reward; for some little time her husband had appeared to her
in a robe of shining light and often attended by lovely angels.

Agne had not lost a word of this narrative, and when, next morning,
she felt the cold hand of the dead youth and looked at his drawn and
pain-stricken features, she shuddered with vague terrors: he, she
thought, like Dorothea's husband, must have hell-torments to endure.
When she presently found her