oss had convinced him that even a
martyr's death could be sweet; hence he wished it for Lygia and himself
as the change of an evil, sad, and oppressive fate for a better.

At times he had a foretaste of life beyond the grave. That sadness which
hung over the souls of both was losing its former burning bitterness,
and changing gradually into a kind of trans-terrestrial, calm abandon to
the will of God. Vinicius, who formerly had toiled against the current,
had struggled and tortured himself, yielded now to the stream, believing
that it would bear him to eternal calm. He divined, too, that Lygia, as
well as he, was preparing for death,--that, in spite of the prison walls
separating them, they were advancing together; and he smiled at that
thought as at happiness.

In fact, they were advancing with as much agreement as if they had
exchanged thoughts every day for a long time. Neither had Lygia any
desire, any hope, save the hope of a life beyond the grave. Death was
presented to her not only as a liberation from the terrible walls of the
prison, from the hands of Caesar and Tigellinus,--not only as liberation,
but as the hour of her marriage to Vinicius. In view of this unshaken
certainty, all else lost importance. After death would come her
happiness, which was even earthly, so that she waited for it also as a
betrothed waits for the wedding-day.

And that immense current of faith, which swept away from life and bore
beyond the grave thousands of those first confessors, bore away Ursus
also. Neither had he in his heart been resigned to Lygia's death;
but when day after day through the prison walls came news of what was
happening in the amphitheatres and the gardens, when death seemed the
common, inevitable lot of all Christians and also their good, higher
than all mortal conceptions of happiness, he did not dare to pray to
Christ to deprive Lygia of that happiness or to delay it for long years.
In his simple barbarian soul he thought, besides, that more of those
heavenly delights would belong to the daughter of the Lygian chief, that
she would have more of them than would a whole crowd of simple ones to
whom he himself belonged, and that in eternal glory she would sit nearer
to the "Lamb" than would others. He had heard, it is true, that before
God men are equal; but a conviction was lingering at the bottom of his
soul that the daughter of a leader, and besides of a leader of all the
Lygians, was not the same as the fir