f the stillness of terror.

Arbaces himself now resolved to exert all his arts to possess himself of
that treasure he so burningly coveted. He was cheered and elated by his
conquests over her brother. From the hour in which Apaecides fell
beneath the voluptuous sorcery of that fete which we have described, he
felt his empire over the young priest triumphant and insured. He knew
that there is no victim so thoroughly subdued as a young and fervent man
for the first time delivered to the thraldom of the senses.

When Apaecides recovered, with the morning light, from the profound
sleep which succeeded to the delirium of wonder and of pleasure, he was,
it is true, ashamed--terrified--appalled. His vows of austerity and
celibacy echoed in his ear; his thirst after holiness--had it been
quenched at so unhallowed a stream? But Arbaces knew well the means by
which to confirm his conquest. From the arts of pleasure he led the
young priest at once to those of his mysterious wisdom. He bared to his
amazed eyes the initiatory secrets of the sombre philosophy of the
Nile--those secrets plucked from the stars, and the wild chemistry,
which, in those days, when Reason herself was but the creature of
Imagination, might well pass for the lore of a diviner magic. He seemed
to the young eyes of the priest as a being above mortality, and endowed
with supernatural gifts. That yearning and intense desire for the
knowledge which is not of earth--which had burned from his boyhood in
the heart of the priest--was dazzled, until it confused and mastered his
clearer sense. He gave himself to the art which thus addressed at once
the two strongest of human passions, that of pleasure and that of
knowledge. He was loth to believe that one so wise could err, that one
so lofty could stoop to deceive. Entangled in the dark web of
metaphysical moralities, he caught at the excuse by which the Egyptian
converted vice into a virtue. His pride was insensibly flattered that
Arbaces had deigned to rank him with himself, to set him apart from the
laws which bound the vulgar, to make him an august participator, both in
the mystic studies and the magic fascinations of the Egyptian's
solitude. The pure and stern lessons of that creed to which Olinthus
had sought to make him convert, were swept away from his memory by the
deluge of new passions. And the Egyptian, who was versed in the articles
of that true faith, and who soon learned from his pupil the ef