state, but deprived also of all their old
honours and lands and privileges. And sadly they buried the things that
had been holy, where no man knew, and watched the fire together, one
last night, till it burned out to white ashes in the spring dawn; and
they embraced one another with tears and went away. Some became
Christians, and some afterwards married; but there was one who would
not, though she loved as none of them loved, and she withdrew from the
world and lived a pure life for the sake of the old faith and of her
solemn vows.

So, at last, the Christian believed what she told him, that it was
better to love in that way, because when he and she were freed at last
from all earthly longings, they would be united for ever and ever; and
she became a Christian, too, and after the other five Vestals were dead,
she also passed away; and the man who had loved her so long, in her own
way, died peacefully on the next day, loving her and hoping to join her,
and having led a good life. After that there was peace, and they seemed
to be together.

That was their story as it gradually took shape out of fragments and
broken visions, and though the man who dreamt these things could not
conceive, when he remembered them, that he could ever become at all a
saintly character, yet in the vision he knew that he was always himself,
and all that he thought and did seemed natural, though it often seemed
hard, and he suffered much in some ways, but in others he found great
happiness.

It was a simple story and a most improbable one. He was quite sure that
no matter in what age he might have lived, instead of in the twentieth
century, he would have felt and acted as he now did when he was wide
awake. But that did not matter. The important point was that his
imagination was making for him a sort of secondary existence in sleep,
in which he was desperately in love with some one who exactly resembled
Cecilia Palladio and who bore her first name; and this dreaming created
such a strong and lasting impression in his mind that, in real life, he
could not separate Cecilia Palladio from Cecilia the Vestal, and found
himself on the point of saying to her in reality the very things which
he had said to her in imagination while sleeping. The worst of it was
this identity of the real and the unreal, for he was persuaded that with
very small opportunity the two would turn into one.

He hated thinking, under all circumstances, as compared with action