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
completely. My heart is heavy enough to-day I can tell you."

"Poor boy!" said the countryman. "Yes, I am truly your friend, and am
anxious to remain so; you are not to blame in this business--and for that
matter, I am anything but cheerful. You have chosen to say: Down with the
shrines! Perish all those who do not think as we do! Still, look at the
thing as you will, in some cases certainly violence must ensue--nay, if
no blood is shed it will be a wonder! You sum up the matter in one common
term: The heathen peasants on the estate. My view of it is totally
different; I know these farmers and their wives and children, each one by
name and by sight. There is not