"You order it, and you are my mother," said Polykarp.

He slowly went up to the chest in which his tools and instruments lay,
and bitter tears ran down his cheeks, as he took his heaviest hammer in
his hand.

When the sky has shown for many days in summer-blue, and then suddenly
the clouds gather for a storm, when the first silent but fearful flash
with it noisy but harmless associate the thunder-clap has terrified the
world, a second and third thunder-bolt immediately follow. Since the
stormy night of yesterday had broken in on the peaceful, industrious, and
monotonous life by the senator's hearth, many things had happened that
had filled him and his wife with fresh anxiety.

In other houses it was nothing remarkable that a slave should run away,
but in the senator's it was more than twenty years since such a thing had
occurred, and yesterday the goat-herd Miriam had disappeared. This was
vexatious, but the silent sorrow of his son Polykarp was a greater
anxiety to Petrus. It did not please him that the youth, who was usually
so vehement, should submit unresistingly and almost indifferently to the
Bishop Agapitus, who prohibited his completing his lions. His son's sad
gaze, his crushed and broken aspect were still in his mind when at last
he went to rest for the night; it was already late, but sleep avoided him
even as it had avoided Dorothea. While the mother was thinking of her
son's sinful love and the bleeding wound in his young and betrayed heart,
the father grieved for Polykarp's baffled hopes of exercising his art on
a great work and recalled the saddest, bitterest day of his own youth;
for he too had served his apprenticeship under a sculptor in Alexandria,
had looked up to the works of the heathen as noble models, and striven to