had gone on around him, he had long
forgotten, but one image was deeply imprinted on his soul, that of the
face of his mother bending over him in deadly anguish, but who had gazed
on her sick boy not more tenderly, or more anxiously, than this despised
woman on her suffering child.

"There is only one utterly unselfish, utterly pure and utterly divine
love," said he to himself, "and that is the love of Isis for Horus--the
love of a mother for her child. If these people were indeed so foul as
to defile every thing they touch, how would this pure, this tender, holy
impulse show itself even in them in all its beauty and perfection?"

"Still," he continued, "the Celestials have implanted maternal love in
the breast of the lioness, of the typhonic river-horse of the Nile."

He looked compassionately at the wife of the paraschites.

He saw her dark face as she turned it away from the sick girl. She had
felt her breathe, and a smile of happiness lighted up her old features;
she nodded first to the surgeon, and then with a deep sigh of relief to
her husband, who, while he did not cease the movement of his left hand,
held up his right hand in prayer to heaven, and his wife did the same.

It seemed to Pentaur that he could see the souls of these two, floating
above the youthful creature in holy union as they joined their hands;
and again he thought of his parents' house, of the hour when his sweet,
only sister died. His mother had thrown herself weeping on the pale
form, but his father had stamped his foot and had thrown back his head,
sobbing and striking his forehead with his fist.

"How piously submissive and thankful are these unclean ones!" thought
Pentaur; and repugnance for the old laws began to take root in his
heart. "Maternal love may exist in the hyaena, but to seek and find
God pertains only to man, who has a noble aim. Up to the limits of
eternity--and God is eternal!--thought is denied to animals; they cannot
even smile. Even men cannot smile at first, for only physical
life--an animal soul--dwells in them; but soon a share of the world's
soul--beaming intelligence--works within them, and first shows itself in
the smile of a child, which is as pure as the light and the truth from
which it comes. The child of the paraschites smiles like any other
creature born of woman, but how few aged men there are, even among the
initiated, who can smile as innocently and brightly as this woman who
has grown grey under open i