but would have done as he did? That
fearful blow had struck him in a vital spot. Since that day he had
felt himself slowly dying; and that sense of weakness, those desperate
tremors, the discomforts and suffering which blighted every hour of his
life, were also to be set down to the account of the Melchite tyrants.

His waning powers had indeed only been kept up by his original vigor and
his burning thirst for revenge, and fate had allowed him to quench it
in a way which, as time went on, seemed too absolute to his peace-loving
nature. Though not indeed by his act, still with his complicity he
saw the Byzantine Empire bereft of the rich province which Caesar had
entrusted to his rule, saw the Greeks and everything that bore the name
of Melchite driven out of Egypt with ignominy--though he would gladly
have prevented it--in many places slain like dogs by the furious
populace who hailed the Moslems as their deliverers.

Thus all the evil he had invoked on the murderers of his children and
the oppressors and torturers of his people had come upon them; his
revenge was complete. But, in the midst of his satisfaction at this
strange fulfilment of the fervent wish of years, his conscience had
lifted up its voice; new, and hitherto unknown terrors had come upon
him. He lacked the strength of mind to be a hero or a reformer. Too
great an event had been wrought through his agency, too fearful a doom
visited on thousands of men! The Christian Faith--to him the highest
consideration--had been too greatly imperilled by his act, for the
thought that he had caused all this to be calmly endurable. The
responsibility proved too heavy for his shoulders; and whenever he
repeated to himself that it was not he who had invited the Arabs into
the land, and that he must have been crushed in the attempt to repel
them, he could hear voices all round him denouncing him as the man
who had surrendered his native land to them, and he fancied himself
environed by dangers--believing those who spoke to him of assassins sent
forth by the Byzantines to kill him.--But even more appalling, was
his dread of the wrath of Heaven against the man who had betrayed a
Christian country to the Infidels. Even his consciousness of having
been, all his life long, a right-minded, just man could not fortify
him against this terror; there was but one thing which could raise his
quelled spirit: the white pillules which had long been as indispensable
to him as air and wa