One thing, at any rate, is certain: I have nothing more to do with the
estate."




CHAPTER VI.

After leaving his stepmother Demetrius made good use of his time and
dictated a number of letters to his secretary, a slave he had brought
with him to Alexandria, for the use of the pen was to him unendurable
labor. The letters were on business, relating to his departure from
Cyrenaica and his purpose of managing his own estates for the future, and
when they lay before him, finished, rolled up and sealed, he felt that he
had come to a mile-stone on his road, a landmark in his life. He paced
the room in silence, trying to picture to himself the fate of the slaves
and peasants who, for so many years, had been his faithful servants and
fellow-laborers, whose confidence he had entirely won, and many of whom
he truly loved. But he could not conceive of their life, their toil or
their festivals, bereft of images, offerings, garlands, and hymns of
rejoicing. To him they were as children, forbidden to laugh and play,
and he could not help once more recurring to his boyhood and the day of
his going to school, when, instead of running and shouting in his
father's sunny garden, he had been made to sit still and silent in a dull
class-room. And now had the whole world reached such a boundary line in
existence beyond which there was to be no more freedom and careless joy--
where a ceaseless struggle for higher things must begin and never end?

If the Gospel were indeed true, and if all it promised could ever find
fulfilment, it might perhaps be prudent to admit the sinfulness of man