‘Ah, my brother!’ said she, ’these hard duties of thine have shattered thy very sense.  Come to me, Apaecides, my brother, my own brother; give me thy hand, let me wipe the dew from thy brow—­chide me not now, I understand thee not; think only that Ione could not offend thee!’

‘Ione,’ said Apaecides, drawing her towards him, and regarding her tenderly, ’can I think that this beautiful form, this kind heart, may be destined to an eternity of torment?’

‘Dii meliora! the gods forbid!’ said Ione, in the customary form of words by which her contemporaries thought an omen might be averted.

The words, and still more the superstition they implied, wounded the ear of Apaecides.  He rose, muttering to himself, turned from the chamber, then, stopping, half way, gazed wistfully on Ione, and extended his arms.

Ione flew to them in joy; he kissed her earnestly, and then he said: 

’Farewell, my sister! when we next meet, thou mayst be to me as nothing; take thou, then, this embrace—­full yet of all the tender reminiscences of childhood, when faith and hope, creeds, customs, interests, objects, were the same to us.  Now, the tie is to be broken!’

With these strange words he left the house.

The great and severest trial of the primitive Christians was indeed this; their conversion separated them from their dearest bonds.  They could not associate with beings whose commonest actions, whose commonest forms of speech, were impregnated with idolatry.  They shuddered at the blessing of love, to their ears it was uttered in a demon’s name.  This, their misfortune, was their strength; if it divided them from the rest of the world, it was to unite them proportionally to each other.  They were men of iron who wrought forth the Word of God, and verily the bonds that bound them were of iron also!

Glaucus found Ione in tears; he had already assumed the sweet privilege to console.  He drew from her a recital of her interview with her brother; but in her confused account of language, itself so confused to one not prepared for it, he was equally at a loss with Ione to conceive the intentions or the meaning of Apaecides.

‘Hast thou ever heard much,’ asked she, ’of this new sect of the Nazarenes, of which my brother spoke?’

‘I have often heard enough of the votaries,’ returned Glaucus, ’but of their exact tenets know I naught, save that in their doctrine there seemeth something preternaturally chilling and morose.  They live apart from their kind; they affect to be shocked even at our simple uses of garlands; they have no sympathies with the cheerful amusements of life; they utter awful threats of the coming destruction of the world; they appear, in one word, to have brought their unsmiling and gloomy creed out of the cave of Trophonius.  Yet,’ continued Glaucus, after a slight pause, ’they have not wanted men of great power and genius, nor converts, even among the