and to give up the joys and glories of this world to win the eternal
treasure that it described. Many a good and wise man whom he had known
--nay the Emperor, the great and learned Theodosius himself--was devoted
heart and soul to the Christian faith, and Demetrius knew from his own
experience that his mother's creed, in which he had been initiated as a
boy and from which his father, after holding him at the font had
perverted him at an early age, offered great consolations and enduring
help to those whose existence was one of care, poverty, and suffering.
But his laborers and servants? They were healthy and contented. What
power on earth could induce them--a race that clung devotedly to custom
--to desert the faith of their fathers, and the time-honored traditions
to which they owed all the comforts and pleasures of life, or to seek in
a strange creed the aid which they already believed that they possessed.

He did not repent of his determination; but he nevertheless said to
himself that, when once he was gone, Mary would proceed only too soon on
the work of extermination and destruction; and every temple on the
estate, every statue, every whispering grotto, every shrine and stone
anointed by pious hands, doomed now to perish, rose before his fancy.

Demetrius was accustomed to rise at cock-crow and go to bed at an early
hour, and he was on the point of retiring even before the usual time,
when Marcus came to his room and begged him to give him yet an hour.

"You are angry with my mother," said the younger man with a look of
melancholy entreaty, "but you know there is nothing that she would not
sacrifice for the faith. And you can smile so bitterly! But only put
yourself in my place. Loving my mother as I do, it is acutely painful
to me to see another person--to see you whom I love, too, for you are
my friend and brother--to see you, I say, turn your back on her so