light in seeing his creature: stultify the primary
laws of their being. Farewell!'

And while the Prefect stood petrified with astonishment, he retired to
the further extremity of the deck, muttering to himself--

'Did I not know all along that this gleam was too sudden and too bright
to last? Did I not know that he, too, would prove himself like all the
rest--an ass?.... Fool! to have looked for common sense on such an earth
as this!.... Back to chaos again, Raphael Aben-Ezra, and spin ropes of
sand to the end of the farce!'

And mixing with the soldiers, he exchanged no word with the Prefect and
his children, till they reached the port of Berenice; and then putting
the necklace into Victoria's hands, vanished among the crowds upon the
quay, no one knew whither.

CHAPTER XVIII: THE PREFECT TESTED

WHEN we lost sight of Philammon, his destiny had hurled him once more
among his old friends the Goths, in search of two important elements of
human comfort, freedom and a sister. The former be found at once, in a
large hall where sundry Goths were lounging and toping, into the nearest
corner of which he shrank, and stood, his late terror and rage forgotten
altogether in the one new and absorbing thought--His sister might be in
that house!.... and yielding to so sweet a dream, he began fancying to
himself which of all those gay maidens she might be who had become in
one moment more dear, more great to him, than all things else in heaven
or earth. That fair-haired, rounded Italian? That fierce, luscious,
aquiline-faced Jewess? That delicate, swart, sidelong-eyed Copt? No.
She was Athenian, like himself. That tall, lazy Greek girl, then, from
beneath whose sleepy lids flashed, once an hour, sudden lightnings,
revealing depths of thought and feeling uncultivated, perhaps even
unsuspected, by their possessor. Her? Or that, her seeming sister? Or
the next?.... Or--Was it Pelagia herself, most beautiful and most
sinful of them all? Fearful thought! He blushed scarlet at the bare
imagination: yet why, in his secret heart, was that the most pleasant
hypothesis of them all? And suddenly flashed across him that observation
of one of the girls on board the boat, on his likeness to Pelagia.
Strange, that he had never recollected it before! It must be so! and
yet on what a slender thread, woven of scattered hints and surmises,
did that 'must' depend! He would be sane! he would wait; he would
have patience. Patience, with a siste