toy, the figure of a man kneading dough. The man would work, if a
string were pulled, but Cocce had thrown the toy aside. Lower and
lower sank the small, brown head, more and more sleepily closed the
large, brown eyes, till the child drooped against a stone table that
was supported by the stone figure of a captive, bending beneath the
weight of the table's top.

As Heraklas entered the court his eyes fell upon his sleeping little
sister, but he noted more closely the stone captive against which
she leaned. Heraklas marked how the captive was represented to bend
beneath the table's weight. The boy's eyes grew fierce. Captivity
seemed a cruel thing, since Timokles had gone into it.

Heraklas flung himself on a seat covered by a leopard's skin, and
gazed moodily upward at the palm-leaves, one or two of which stirred
faintly under the slight wind that came from a corridor, whither the
wooden wind-sails,--sloping boards commonly fixed over the terraces
of the upper portions of Egyptian houses,--had conducted the current
of air.

Borne from the streets of Alexandria, there seemed to Heraklas to
come certain new, half-heard noises. He listened, yet nothing
definite reached his ears.

At length, seeing through a range of pillars a slave moving in the
distance, Heraklas summoned the man, and asked what was the cause of
the faintly-heard sounds.

"The people destroy the possessions of some of the Christians,"
humbly replied the slave, whose name was Athribis; and Heraklas,