the night; it was already late, but sleep avoided
him even as it had avoided Dorothea. While the mother was thinking of
her son's sinful love and the bleeding wound in his young and betrayed
heart, the father grieved for Polykarp's baffled hopes of exercising his
art on a great work and recalled the saddest, bitterest day of his own
youth; for he too had served his apprenticeship under a sculptor in
Alexandria, had looked up to the works of the heathen as noble models,
and striven to form himself upon them. He had already been permitted by
his master to execute designs of his own, and out of the abundance of
subjects which offered themselves, he had chosen to model an Ariadne,
waiting and longing for the return of Thescus, as a symbolic image of
his own soul awaiting its salvation. How this work had filled his mind!
how delightful had the hours of labor seemed to him!--when, suddenly,
his stern father had come to the city, had seen his work before it was
quite finished, and instead of praising it had scorned it; had abused
it as a heathen idol, and had commanded Petrus to return home with him
immediately, and to remain there, for that his son should be a pious
Christian, and a good stone-mason withal--not half a heathen, and a
maker of false gods.

Petrus had much loved his art, but he offered no resistance to his
father's orders; he followed him back to the oasis, there to superintend
the work of the slaves who hewed the stone, to measure granite-blocks
for sarcophagi and pillars, and to direct the cutting of them. His
father was a man of steel, and he himself a lad of iron, and when he
saw himself compelled to yield to his father and to leave his master's
workshop, to abandon his cherished and unfinished work and to become an
artizan and mail of business, he swore never again to take a piece of
clay in his hand, or to wield a chisel. And he kept his word even after
his fathers death; but his creative instincts and love of art continued
to live and work in him, and were transmitted to his two sons.

Antonius was a highly gifted artist, and if Polykarp's master was not
mistaken, and if he himself were not misled by fatherly affection, his
second son was on the high road to the very first rank in art--to a
position reached only by elect spirits.

Petrus knew the models for the Good Shepherd and for the lions, and
declared to himself that these last were unsurpassable in truth, power,
and majesty. How eagerly must the