How anxious the good man looked! Her world was not the world of the
Christian freedman; that she plainly understood when the litter in which
Diodoros lay was carried into one of the houses in the side street.

It was a large, plain building, with only a few windows, and those high
up-in fact, as Melissa was presently informed, it was a Christian church.
Before she could express her surprise, Andreas begged her to have a few
minutes' patience; the daemons of sickness were here to be exorcised and
driven out of the sufferer. He pointed to a seat in the vestibule to the
church, a wide but shallow room. Then, at a sign from Andreas, the
slaves carried the litter into a long, low hall with a flat roof.

From where she sat, Melissa could now see that a Christian in priest's
robes, whom they called the exorcist, spoke various invocations over the
sick man, the others listening so attentively that even she began to hope
for some good effect from these incomprehensible formulas; and at the
same time she remembered that her old slave-woman Dido, who worshiped
many gods, wore round her neck, besides a variety of heathen amulets,
a little cross which had been given her by a Christian woman. To her
question why she, a heathen, wore this about her, the old woman replied,
"You can never tell what may help you some day." So perhaps these
exorcisms might not be without some effect on her lover, particularly as
the God of the Christians must be powerful and good.

She herself strove to uplift her soul in prayer to the manes of her lost
mother; but the scene going on around her in the vestibule distracted her
mind with horror. Men, young and old, were slashing themselves with
vehement scourgings on their backs. One white-haired old man, indeed,
handed his whip of hippopotamus-hide to a stalwart lad whose shoulders