altar of
the gods! The fault was not mine that I partook not in your favoured
sports, and joined not the companions whom you sought; it was our
father's will that I should not live as you lived, and I obeyed it!
You have spoken to me in anger, and turned from me in disdain; but
farewell again, Cleander--farewell in forgiveness and in love!'

He might have spoken more, but his voice was drowned in one long shriek
of agony which burst from Numerian's lips, and echoed discordantly
through the hall of the temple, and he sank down with his face to the
ground at the Pagan's feet. The dark and terrible destiny was
fulfilled. The enthusiast for the right and the fanatic for the wrong;
the man who had toiled to reform the Church, and the man who had toiled
to restore the Temple; the master who had received and trusted the
servant in his home, and the servant who in that home had betrayed the
master's trust--the two characters, separated hitherto in the sublime
disunion of good and bad, now struck together in tremendous contact, as
brethren who had drawn their life from one source, who as children had
been sheltered under the same roof!

Not in the hours when the good Christian succoured the then forsaken
Pagan, wandering homeless in Rome, was the secret disclosed; no chance
word of it was uttered when the deceiver told the feigned relation of
his life to the benefactor whom he was plotting to deceive, or when, on
the first morning of the siege, the machinations of the servant
triumphed over the confidence of the master: it was reserved to be
revealed in the words of delirium, at the closing years of madness,
when he who discovered it was unconscious of all that he spoke, and his
eyes were blinded to the true nature of all that he saw; when earthly
voices that might once have called him back to repentance, to
recognition, and to love, were become to him as sounds that have no
meaning; when, by a ruthless and startling fatality, it was on the
brother who had wrought for the true faith that the whole crushing
weight of the terrible disclosure fell, unpartaken by the brother who
had wrought for the false! But the judgments pronounced in Time go
forth from the tribunal of that Eternity to which the mysteries of life
tend, and in which they shall be revealed--neither waiting on human
seasons nor abiding by human justice, but speaking to the soul in the
language of immortality, which is heard in the world that is now, and
interpr