There a throne was the prize, and
might cost the blood and life of thousands!--What did a man bring home
from the churches in the Nile valley? But if he crossed the threshold of
St. Sophia's in Constantinople he often might have his blood curdled,
or bring home--what matter?--bleeding wounds, or even be carried home--a
corpse.

Three times had he seen the throne change masters. An emperor and an
empress had been stripped of the purple and mutilated before his eyes.

Aye, then and there he had had real and intense excitement to thrill
him to the marrow and quick. As for the rest! Well, yes, he had had more
trivial pleasures too. He had not been received as other Egyptians were:
half-educated philosophers--who called themselves Sages and assumed
a mystic and pompously solemn demeanor, Astrologers, Rhetoricians,
poverty-stricken but witty and venemous satirists, physicians making
a display of the learning of their forefathers, fanatical
theologians--always ready to avail themselves of other weapons than
reason and dogma in their bitter contests over articles of faith,
hermits and recluses--as foul in mind as they were dirty in their
persons, corn-merchants and usurers with whom it was dangerous to
conclude a bargain without witnesses. Orion was none of these. As
the handsome, genial, and original-minded son of the rich and noble
Governor, Mukaukas George, he was welcomed as a sort of ambassador;
whatever the golden youth of the city allowed themselves was permitted
to him. His purse was as well lined as theirs, his health and vigor far
more enduring; and his horses had beaten theirs in three races, though
he drove them himself and did not trust them to paid charioteers. The
"rich Egyptian," the "New Antinous," "handsome Orion," as he was called,
could never be spared from feast or entertainment. He was a welcome
guest at the first houses in the city, and in the palace and the villa
of the Senator Justinus, an old friend of his father, he was as much at
home as a son of the house.

It was under his roof, and the auspices of his kindhearted wife Martina,
that he made acquaintance with the fair Heliodora, the widow of a nephew
of the Senator; and the whole city had been set talking of the tender
intimacy Orion had formed with the beautiful young woman whose rigid
virtue had hitherto been a subject of admiration no less than her fair
hair and the big jewels with which she loved to set off her simple
but costly dress. And m