say he has been to you about it by this
time."

The man thus addressed--the same to whom Hiram was to offer Paula's
emerald--was a rich Alexandrian of a happy turn of mind; as soon as the
incursion of the Saracens had made Alexandria an unsafe residence, so
that the majority of his fellow Israelites had fled from the great port,
he had found his way to Memphis, where he could count on the protection
of his patron, the Mukaukas George.

He shook his grizzled curls at this question, but he presently whispered
in the secretary's ear. "We have the very thing he wants. You bring me
the cow and you shall have a calf--and a calf with twelve legs too. Is
it a bargain?"

"Twelve per cent on the profits? Done!" replied the secretary in the
same tone, with a sly smile of intelligence.

When, by-and-bye, an accountant asked him why Orion had not brought home
this fair dame, the bearer too of a noble name, to his parents as their
daughter-in-law, he replied that, being a Greek, she was of course a
Melchite. Those present asked no better reason; as soon as the question
of creed was raised the conversation, as usual in these convivial
evenings, became a squabble over dogmatic differences; in the course of
it a legal official ventured to opine that if the case had been that of
a less personage than a son of the Mukaukas--for whom it was, of
course, out of the question--of a mere Jacobite citizen and his Melchite
sweetheart, for instance, some compromise might have been effected. They
need only have made up their minds each, respectively, to subscribe to
the Monothelitic doctrine--though, he, for his part, could have nothing
to say to anything of the kind; it was warmly upheld by the Imperial
court, and by Cyrus, the deceased patriarch of Alexandria, and was based
on the assumption that there were indeed two natures in Christ, but both
under the control of one and the same will. By this dogma there were
in the Saviour two persons no doubt; still it asserted His unity in a
certain qualified sense, and this was the most important point.

Such an heretical proposition was of course loudly disapproved of by the
assembled Jacobites; differences of opinion were more and more strongly
asserted, and a calm interchange of views turned to a riotous quarrel
which threatened to end in actual violence.

This discussion was already beginning when Paula succeeded in slipping
unseen across the court-yard.

She silently beckoned to Hiram to foll