e, in one real practical human
struggle, and it folds its arms and sits serene and silent, smiling upon
my misery! Oh! fool, fool, thou art filled with the fruit of thy own
devices! Back to the old faith! Home again, then wanderer! And yet how
home? Are not the gates shut against me? Perhaps against her too....
What if she, like me, were a baptized Christian?'

Terrible and all but hopeless that thought flashed across him, as in the
first revulsion of his conscience he plunged utterly and implicitly
back again into the faith of his childhood, and all the dark and cruel
theories popular in his day rose up before him in all their terrors. In
the innocent simplicity of the Laura he had never felt their force; but
he felt them now. If Pelagia were a baptized woman, what was before her
but unceasing penance? Before her, as before him, a life of cold
and hunger, groans and tears, loneliness and hideous soul-sickening
uncertainty. Life was a dungeon for them both henceforth. Be it so!
There was nothing else to believe in. No other rock of hope in earth
or heaven. That at least promised a possibility of forgiveness, of
amendment, of virtue, of reward--ay, of everlasting bliss and glory; and
even if she missed of that, better for her the cell in the desert than
a life of self-contented impurity! If that latter were her destiny, as
Hypatia said, she should at least die fighting against it, defying it,
cursing it! Better virtue with hell, than sin with heaven! And Hypatia
had not even promised her a heaven. The resurrection of the flesh was
too carnal a notion for her refined and lofty creed. And so, his four
months' dream swept away in a moment, he hurried back to his chamber,
with one fixed thought before him--the desert; a cell for Pelagia;
another for himself. There they would repent, and pray, and mourn out
life side by side, if perhaps God would have mercy upon their souls.
Yet--perhaps, she might not have been baptized after all. And then
she was safe. Like other converts from Paganism, she might become a
catechumen, and go on to baptism, where the mystic water would wash
away in a moment all the past, and she would begin life afresh, in the
spotless robes of innocence. Yet he had been baptized, he knew from
Arsenius, before he left Athens; and she was older than he. It was
all but impossible yet he would hope; and breathless with anxiety
and excitement, he ran up the narrow stairs and found Miriam standing
outside, her han