“O Phoebus,” replied Nonnus, “were it any God but thou, I should bend before him in silence, having nought to reply.  But thou art a poet, and thou understandest the temper of a poet.  Thou knowest how beyond other men he is devoured by the craving for sympathy.  This and not vulgar vanity is his motive of action; his shaft is launched in vain unless he can deem it embedded in the heart of a friend.  Thou mayest well judge what scoffings and revilings my Dionysiac epic has brought upon me in this evil age; yet, had this been all, peradventure I might have borne it.  But it was not all.  The gentle, the good, the affectionate, they who in happier times would have been my audience, came about me, saying, Nonnus, why sing the strains against which we must shut our ears?  Sing what we may listen to, and we will love and honour thee.  I could not bear the thought of going to my grave without having awakened an echo of sympathy, and weakly but not basely I have yielded, given them what they craved, and suffered them, since the Muses’ garland is not theirs to bestow, to reward me with a mitre.”

“And what demanded they?” asked Apollo.

“Oh, a mere romance!  Something entirely fabulous.”

“I must see it,” persisted Apollo; and Nonnus reluctantly disinterred his scroll from under the big dictionary, and handed it up, trembling like a schoolboy who anticipates a castigation for a bad exercise.

“What trash have we here?” cried Phoebus—­

  [Greek:  “Achronos aen, akichaetos, en arraetoos Logos archae,]
  [Greek:  ’Isophuaes Genetaeros omaelikos Tios amaetoor,]
  [Greek:  Kai Logos antophygoio Theou, phoos, ek phaeos phoos.]

“If it isn’t the beginning of the Gospel of John!  Thy impiety is worse than thy poetry!”

Apollo cast the scroll indignantly to the ground.  His countenance wore an expression so similar to that with which he is represented in act to smite the Python, that Nonnus judged it prudent to catch up his manuscript and hold it shield-wise before his face.

“Thou doest well,” said Apollo, laughing bitterly; “that rampart is indeed impenetrable to my arrows.”

Nonnus seemed about to fall prostrate, when a sharp rap came to the door.

“That is the Governor’s knock,” he exclaimed.  “Do not forsake me utterly, O Phoebus!” But as he turned to open the door, Apollo vanished.  The Governor entered, a sagacious, good-humoured-looking man in middle life.

“Who was with thee just now?” he asked.  “Methought I heard voices.”

“Merely the Muse,” explained Nonnus, “with whom I am wont to hold nocturnal communings.”

“Indeed!” replied the Governor.  “Then the Muse has done well to take herself off, and will do even better not to return.  Bishops must have no flirtations with Muses, heavenly or earthly—­not that I am now altogether certain that thou wilt be a bishop.”

“How so?” asked Nonnus, not without a feeling of relief.