account to obey the tyrant's call again. Then he had promised to hide
her securely, either on Zeno's estate or else in the house of another
friend, which was difficult of access. When Dame Berenike had again,
and with particular eagerness, suggested her ship, Andreas had exclaimed:

"In the garden, on the ship, under the earth--only not back to Caesar!"

The last question of the freedman's, as to whether she had meditated
further on his discourse, had reminded her of the sentence, "The fullness
of the time is come"; and afterward the thought occurred to her, again
and again, that in the course of the next few hours some decisive event
would happen to her, "fulfilling the time," as Andreas expressed it.

When, therefore, somewhat later, she was alone with the chief priest's
wife, who had concluded her comforting, pious exhortations, Melissa asked
the lady Euryale whether she had ever heard the sentence, "When the
fullness of the time is come."

At this the lady cried, gazing at the girl with surprised inquiry:

"Are you, then, after all, connected with the Christians?"

"Certainly not," answered the young girl, firmly. "I heard it
accidentally, and Andreas, Polybius's freedman, explained it to me."

"A good interpreter," replied the elder lady. "I am only an ignorant
woman; yet, child, even I have experienced that a day, an hour, comes to
every man in the course of his life in which he afterward sees that the
time was fulfilled. As the drops become mingled with the stream, so at
that moment the things we have done and thought unite to carry us on a