c 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 condemned her," said Paulus with warmth, "for
I believed that she was guilty, just as you believe that I am, just as
every one that is bound by no ties of love is more ready to believe evil
than good, Now I know, aye, know for certain, that we did the poor woman
an injustice. If the splendor of the lovely dream, that you call Sirona,
has been clouded by my fault--"

"Clouded? And by you?" laughed Polykarp. "Can the toad that plunges into
the sea, cloud its shining blue, can the black bat that flits across the
night, cloud the pure light of the full-moon?"

An emotion of rage again shot through the anchorite's heart, but he was
by this time on his guard against himself, and he only said bitterly,
and with hardly-won composure:

"And how was it then with the flower, and with the bird, that were
destroyed by beasts without understanding? I fancy you meant no absent
third person by that beast, and yet now you declare that it is not
within my power even to throw a shadow over your day-star! You see
you contradict yourself in your anger, and the son of a wise man, who
himself has not long since left the school of rhetoric, should try to
avoid that. You might regard me with less hostility, for I will not
offend you; nay, I will repay your evil words with good--perhaps the
very best indeed that you ever heard in your life. Sirona is a worthy
and innocent wom