altered tone of
indifference. "Throw yourself upon me, and do with me what you will; I
will not prevent you. Here I shall stand, and I will not fight, for you
have so far hit the truth--this holy place is not an arena. But the
Gaulish lady belongs neither to you nor to me, and who gives you a
claim--?"

"Who gives me a right over her?" interrupted Polykarp, stepping close up
to his questioner with sparkling eyes. "He who permits the worshipper to
speak of his God. Sirona is mine, as the sun and moon and stars are mine,
because they shed a beautiful light on my murky path. My life is
mine--and she was the life of my life, and therefore I say boldly, and
would say, if there were twenty such as Phoebicius here, she belongs to
me. And because I regarded her as my own, and so regard her still, I hate
you and fling my scorn in your teeth--you are like a hungry sheep that
has got into the gardener's flower-bed, and stolen from the stem the
wonderful, lovely flower that he has nurtured with care, and that only
blooms once in a hundred years--like a cat that has sneaked into some
marble hall, and that to satisfy its greed has strangled some rare and
splendid bird that a traveller has brought from a distant land. But you!
you hypocritical robber, who disregard your own body with beastly pride,
and sacrifice it to low brutality--what should you know of the magic
charm of beauty--that daughter of heaven, that can touch even thoughtless
children, and before which the gods themselves do homage! I have a right
to Sirona; for hide her where you will--or even if the centurion were to
find her, and to fetter her to himself with chains and rivets of
brass--still that which makes her the noblest work of the Most High--the
image of her beauty--lives in no one, in no one as it lives in me. This
hand has never even touched your victim--and yet God has given Sirona to
no man as he has given her wholly to me, for to no man can she be what
she is to me, and no man can love her as I do! She has the nature of an
angel, and the heart of a child; she is without spot, and as pure as the
diamond, or the swan's breast, or the morning-dew in the bosom of a rose.
And though she had let you into her house a thousand times, and though my
father even, and my own mother, and every one, every one pointed at her
and condemned her, I would never cease to believe in her purity. It is
you who have brought her to shame; it is you--"

"I kept silence while all co