self alone with the corpse she bent over it
and kissed the pale lips, and swore to herself that she would save his
soul.

That same evening she went back to Eusebius and told him of her wish
to withdraw to the desert of Koizoum and become a recluse. The old man
besought her to remain with him, to take charge of her little brother,
and not to abandon him and his old wife; for that it was a no less
lovely Christian duty to be compassionate and helpful, and cherish the
feeble in their old age. His wife added her entreaties and tears; but a
sudden chill had gripped Agne's heart; dry-eyed and rigid she resisted
their prayers, and took leave of her benefactors and of Papias.
Bare-foot and begging her way, she started for the south-east and
reached the shores of the Red Sea. There she found the stonemason's
widow, emaciated and haggard, with matted hair, evidently dying. Agne
remained with her, closed her eyes, and then lived on as Dorothea had
lived, in the same cave, till the fame of her sanctity spread far beyond
the boundaries of Egypt.

When Papias had grown to man's estate and was installed as steward to
Demetrius, he sought his sister many times and tried to persuade her to
live with him in his new home; but she never would consent to quit her
solitary cell. She would not have exchanged it for a king's palace; for
Orpheus appeared to her in nightly visions, radiant with the glories of
Heaven; and time was passing and the hour drawing near when she might
hope to be with him once more.

The widow Mary, in her later years, made many pilgrimages to holy places
and saintly persons, and among others to Agne, the recluse; but she
would never be induced to visit Cyrenaica, whither she was frequently
invited by her children and grandchildren; some more powerful excitant
was needed to prompt her to face the discomforts of a journey.

The old Heathen cults had completely vanished from the Greek capital
long before her death. With it died the splendor and the power of the
second city in the world; and of all the glories of the city of
Serapis nothing now remains but a mighty column--[Known as Pompey's
Pillar.]--towering to the skies, the last surviving fragment of the
beautiful temple of the sovereign-god whose fall marked so momentous
an epoch in the life of the human race. But, like this pillar, outward
Beauty--the sense of form that characterized the heathen mind--has
survived through the ages. We can gaze up at the one and