god and his house, none were left but Porphyrius and those who
were nursing him. After a long and agonizing period of silence heavy
fists came thundering at the door. Gorgo started up to unbolt it, but
Apuleius held her back; so it was forced off its hinges and thing into
the temple-aisle on which the room opened. At the same instant a party of
soldiers entered the room and glanced round it enquiringly.

The physician turned as pale as death, and sank incapable of speech on a
seat by his patient's couch; but Gorgo turned with calm dignity to the
centurion who led the intruders, and explained to him who she was, and
that she was here under the protection of the leech to tend her suffering
father. She concluded by asking to speak with Constantine the prefect of
cavalry, or with the Comes Romanus, to whom she and her father were well
known.

There was nothing unusual in a sick man being brought into the Serapeum
for treatment, and the calm, undoubting superiority of Gorgo's tone as
well as the high rank of the men whose protection she appealed to,
commanded the centurion's respectful consideration; however, his orders
were to send every one out of the temple who was not a Roman soldier, so
he begged her to wait a few minutes, and soon returned with the legate
Volcatius, the captain of his legion. This knightly patrician well
knew--as did every lover of horses--the owner of the finest stable in
Alexandria, and was quite willing to allow Gorgo and Apuleius to remain
with their patient; at the same time he warned them that a great
catastrophe was imminent. Gorgo, however, persisted in her wish to be by
her father's side, so he left her a guard to protect them.

The soldiers were too busy to linger; instead of replacing the door they
had torn down, they pushed it out of their way; and Gorgo, seeing that
her father remained in precisely the same condition, drew back the
curtain which was all that now divided them from the hypostyle, and
looked out over the heads of a double row of soldiers. They were posted
close round the lower step of the platform that raised the hypostyle
above the nave and the colonnades on each side of it.

In the distance Gorgo could see a vast body of men slowly approaching in
detachments, and with long pauses at intervals. They stopped for some
time in the outer hall, and before they entered the basilica twenty
Christian priests came in with strange gestures and a still stranger
chant; these were exo