held him. The Roman
emperor, Septimius Severus, who ruled Egypt, had lately issued an
edict that no one should become a Christian. What hope was there for
Timokles?

"He will never come back!" said Heraklas now, with a low sob, as the
desert swam before his tear-filled eyes. "O Timokles!"

There was a rustle among the leaves not far away. Heraklas turned
hastily.

But it was no person who disturbed his solitude. Heraklas saw only
the head of an ibis, called "Hac" or "Hib" by the Egyptians, and the
lad, mindful of the honor due the bird as sacred to the god Thoth,
the Egyptian deity of letters and of the moon, made a gesture of
semi-reverence. He remembered what the Egyptians were wont to say,
when on the nineteenth day of the first month, they ate honey and
eggs in honor of Thoth: "How sweet a thing is truth!"

Heraklas murmured with a heavy sigh, "Timokles told me he had found
'the truth' O Timokles, is thy 'truth' sweet to thee now? Oh, my
brother, my brother!"

Heraklas cast himself down among the vines, and wept his unavailing
tears. Little did the lad, reared in a pagan home, know of the
sweetness of the Christian faith, for which Timokles had forsaken
all.

Heraklas' small sister, the child Cocce, sat on the pavement in the
central court of her home in Alexandria. Above her towered three
palms that shaded the court. Beside the little girl was an Egyptian
toy, the figure of a man kneading dough. The man would work, if a
string were pulled, but Cocce had thrown the toy aside. Lower and
lower sank the small, brown head, more and more sleepily closed the
large, brown eyes, till the child drooped against a stone table that
was supported by the stone figure of a captive, bending beneath the
weight of the table's top.

As Heraklas entered the court his eyes fell upon his sleeping little
sister, but he noted more closely the stone captive against which
she leaned. Heraklas marked how the captive was represented to bend
beneath the table's weight. The boy's eyes grew fierce. Captivity
seemed a cruel thing, since Timokles had gone into it.

Heraklas flung himself on a seat covered by a leopard's skin, and
gazed moodily upward at the palm-leaves, one or two of which stirred
faintly under the slight wind that came from a corridor, whither the
wooden wind-sails,--sloping boards commonly fixed over the terraces
of the upper portions of Egyptian houses,--had conducted the current
of air.

Borne from the streets of