ccommodated the State officers of Finance for the province,
and the ground-floor rooms had been suitably and comfortably fitted
up for the Ideologos--the supreme controller of this department, who
usually resided at Alexandria, but who often spent some weeks at Memphis
when on a tour of inspection. But the Arabians had transferred the
management of the finances of the whole country to the new capital of
Fostat on the other shore of the river, and that of the monetary
affairs of the decaying city had been incorporated with the treasurer's
department of the Mukaukas' household. The senate of the city had found
the expense of this huge building too heavy, and had been well content
to let the lower rooms to Philippus and his Egyptian friend, Horapollo.

The two men occupied different rooms, but the same slaves attended to
their common housekeeping and also waited on the physician's assistant,
a modest and well-informed Alexandrian.

When Philippus entered his old friend's lofty and spacious study
he found him still up, sitting before a great number of rolls of
manuscript, and so absorbed in his work that he did not notice his
late-coming comrade till the leech bid him good-evening. His only reply
was an unintelligible murmur, for some minutes longer the old man was
lost in study; at last, however, he looked up at Philippus, impatiently
tossing an ivory ruler-which he had been using to open and smooth the
papyrus on to the table; and at the same moment a dark bundle under it
began to move--this was the old man's slave who had long been sleeping
there.

Three lamps on the writing-table threw a bright light on the old man and
his surroundings, while the physician, who had thrown himself on a couch
in a corner of the large room, remained in the dark.

What startled the midnight student was his housemate's unwonted silence;
it disturbed him as the cessation of the clatter of the wheel disturbs a
man who lives in a mill. He looked at his friend with surprised enquiry,
but Philippus was dumb, and the old man turned once more to his rolls of
manuscript. But he had lost the necessary concentration; his brown hand,
in which the blue veins stood out like cords, fidgeted with the scrolls
and the ivory rule, and his sunken lips, which had before been firmly
closed, were now twitching restlessly.

The man's whole aspect was singular and not altogether pleasing: his
lean brown figure was bent with age, his thoroughly Egyptian face, wi