ermas had found courage enough to give utterance to his wish
to speak with the senator, and the young woman, who looked with
complacency on his strong and youthful frame, offered to conduct him to
him.

Petrus had been talking to his grown up elder sons; they were tall men,
but their father was even taller than they, and of unusual breadth of
shoulder.

While the young men were speaking, he stroked his short grey beard and
looked down at the ground in sombre gravity, as it might have seemed to
the careless observer; but any one who looked closer might quickly
perceive that not seldom a pleased smile, though not less often a
somewhat bitter one, played upon the lips of the prudent and judicious
man. He was one of those who can play with their children like a young
mother, take the sorrows of another as much to heart as if they were
their own, and yet who look so gloomy, and allow themselves to make such
sharp speeches, that only those who are on terms of perfect confidence
with them, cease to misunderstand them and fear them. There was something
fretting the soul of this man, who nevertheless possessed all that could
contribute to human happiness. His was a thankful nature, and yet he was
conscious that he might have been destined to something greater than fate
had permitted him to achieve or to be. He had remained a stone-cutter,
but his sons had both completed their education in good schools in
Alexandria. The elder, Antonius, who already had a house of his own and a
wife and children, was an architect and artist-mechanic; the younger,
Polykarp, was a gifted young sculptor. The noble church of the oasis-city
had been built under the direction of the elder; Polykarp, who had only
come home a month since, was preparing to establish and carry on works of
great extent in his father's quarries, for he had received a commission
to decorate the new court of the Sebasteion or Caesareum, as it was
called--a grand pile in Alexandria--with twenty granite lions. More than
thirty artists had competed with him for this work, but the prize was
unanimously adjudged to his models by qualified judges. The architect
whose function it was to construct the colonnades and pavement of the
court was his friend, and had agreed to procure the blocks of granite,
the flags and the columns which he required from Petrus' quarries, and
not, as had formerly been the custom, from those of Syene by the first
Cataract.

Antonius and Polykarp were now