higher natures demand higher
pursuit, religion opens more god-like secrets. I am pleased to find in
you the character I had expected. You have taken the vows; you cannot
recede. Advance--I will be your guide.'

'And what wilt thou teach me, O singular and fearful man? New
cheats--new...'

'No--I have thrown thee into the abyss of disbelief; I will lead thee
now to the eminence of faith. Thou hast seen the false types: thou
shalt learn now the realities they represent. There is no shadow,
Apaecides, without its substance. Come to me this night. Your hand.'

Impressed, excited, bewildered by the language of the Egyptian,
Apaecides gave him his hand, and master and pupil parted.

It was true that for Apaecides there was no retreat. He had taken the
vows of celibacy: he had devoted himself to a life that at present
seemed to possess all the austerities of fanaticism, without any of the
consolations of belief It was natural that he should yet cling to a
yearning desire to reconcile himself to an irrevocable career. The
powerful and profound mind of the Egyptian yet claimed an empire over
his young imagination; excited him with vague conjecture, and kept him
alternately vibrating between hope and fear.

Meanwhile Arbaces pursued his slow and stately way to the house of Ione.
As he entered the tablinum, he heard a voice from the porticoes of the
peristyle beyond, which, musical as it was, sounded displeasingly on his
ear--it was the voice of the young and beautiful Glaucus, and for the
first time an involuntary thrill of jealousy shot through the breast of
the Egyptian. On entering the peristyle, he found Glaucus seated by the
side of Ione. The fountain in the odorous garden cast up its silver
spray in the air, and kept a delicious coolness in the midst of the
sultry noon. The handmaids, almost invariably attendant on Ione, who
with her freedom of life preserved the most delicate modesty, sat at a
little distance; by the feet of Glaucus lay the lyre on which he had
been playing to Ione one of the Lesbian airs. The scene--the group
before Arbaces, was stamped by that peculiar and refined ideality of
poesy which we yet, not erroneously, imagine to be the distinction of
the ancients--the marble columns, the vases of flowers, the statue,
white and tranquil, closing every vista; and, above all, the two living
forms, from which a sculptor might have caught either inspiration or
despair!

Arbaces, pausing for a m