And his mind was still perturbed.  Thirty days he remained in that condition of sadness which precedes the sore trials of a solitary monk.  The image of Thais never left him day or night.  He did not try to banish it, because he still thought it came from God, and was the image of a saint.  But one morning she visited him in a dream, her hair crowned with violets, and her very gentleness seemed so formidable, that he uttered a cry of fright, and woke in an icy sweat.  His eyes were still heavy with sleep, when he felt a moist warm breath on his face.  A little jackal, its two paws placed on the side of the bed, was panting its stinking breath in his face, and grinning at him.

Paphnutius was greatly astonished, and it seemed to him as though a tower had given way under his feet.  And, in fact, he had fallen, for his self-confidence had gone.  For some time he was incapable of thought and when he did recover himself, his meditations only increased his perplexity.

“It is one of two things,” he said to himself; “either this vision, like the preceding ones, came from God, and was a good vision, and it is my natural perversity which has misrepresented it, as wine turns sour in a dirty cup.  I have, by my unworthiness, changed instruction into reproach, of which this diabolical jackal immediately took advantage.  Or else this vision came, not from God, but, on the contrary, from the devil, and was evil.  In that case I should doubt whether the former ones had, as I thought, a celestial origin.  I am therefore incapable of that discernment which is necessary for the ascetic.  In either case it is plain that God is no longer with me,—­of which I feel the effects, though I cannot explain the cause.”

He reasoned in this way, and anxiously asked—­

“Just God, what trials dost Thou appoint for Thy servants if the apparitions of Thy saints are a danger for them?  Give me to discern, by an intelligible sign, that which comes from Thee, and that which comes from the other.”

And as God, whose designs are inscrutable, did not see fit to enlighten his servant, Paphnutius, lost in doubt, resolved not to think of Thais any more.  But his resolutions were vain.  Though absent, she was ever with him.  She gazed at him whilst he read, or meditated, or prayed, or met his eyes wherever he looked.  Her imaginary approach was heralded by a slight sound, such as is made by a woman’s dress when she walks, and the visions had more verisimilitude than reality itself, which moves and is confused, whereas the phantoms which are caused by solitude are fixed and unchangeable.  She came under various appearances—­sometimes pensive, her head crowned with her last perishable wreath, clad as at the banquet at Alexandria, in a mauve robe spangled with silver flowers; sometimes voluptuously in a cloud of light veils, and bathed in the warm shadows of the Grotto of Nymphs; sometimes in a serge cassock, pious and radiant with celestial joy; sometimes tragic, her eyes swimming in the terrors of death, and showing her bare breast bedewed with the blood from her pierced heart.  What disturbed him the most in these visions was that the wreaths, tunics, and veils, that he had burned with his own hands, should thus return; it became evident to him that these things had an imperishable soul, and he cried—­