d great honours, and was covered with green palms and wreaths
of red roses. All round, innumerable lights gleamed out of the heavy
shadow, in which the smoke of Arabian gums seemed like the folds of
angels' robes, and the paintings on the walls visions of Paradise.
Priests, clad in white, were prostrate at the foot of the sarcophagus.
The hymns they sang with the people expressed the delight of suffering,
and mingled, in a triumphal mourning, so much joy with so much grief,
that Thais, in listening to them, felt the pleasures of life and the
terrors of death flowing, at the same time, through her re-awakened
senses.

When they had finished singing, the believers rose, and walked in single
file to the tomb, the side of which they kissed. They were common men,
accustomed to work with their hands. They advanced with a heavy step,
the eyes fixed, the jaw dropped, but they had an air of sincerity. They
knelt down, each in turn, before the sarcophagus, and put their lips
to it. The women lifted their little children in their arms, and gently
placed their cheek to the stone.

Thais, surprised and troubled, asked a deacon why they did so.

"Do you not know, woman," replied the deacon, "that we celebrate to-day
the blessed memory of St. Theodore the Nubian, who suffered for the
faith in the days of the Emperor Diocletian? He lived virtuously and
died a martyr, and that is why, robed in white, we bear red roses to his
glorious tomb."

On hearing these words, Thais fell on her knees, and burst into tears.
Half-forgotten recollections of Ahmes returned to her mind. On the
memory of this obscure, gentle, and unfortunate man, the blaze of
candles, the perfume of roses, the clouds of incense, the music of
hymns, the piety of souls, threw all the charms of glory. Thais thought
in the dazzling glare--

"He was good, and now he has become great and glorious. Why is it that
he is elevated above other men? What is this unknown thing which is more
than riches or pleasure?"

She rose slowly, and turned towards the tomb of the saint who had loved
her, those violet eyes, now filled with tears which glittered in the
candle-light; then, with bowed head, humble, slow, and the last, with
those lips on which so many desires hung, she kissed the stone of the
slave's tomb.

When she returned to her house, she found Nicias, who, with his hair
perfumed, and his tunic thrown open, was reading a treatise on morals
whilst waiting for her. He adva