Basil held up his wasted hand with a smile.

’True, true; you have lost flesh.  Be thankful for it, dear brother; so much the easier you combat with him whose ally is this body of death.  True, the ring may have fallen simply because your finger was so thin.  But be warned, O Basil, against that habit of mind which interprets in an earthly sense things of divine meaning.’

‘I had indeed let my thoughts dwell upon worldliness,’ Basil admitted.

The monk smiled a satisfied reproof.

’Even so, even so!  And look you!  In the moment of your avowal my hand falls upon the ring.’

Rejoicing together, they inspected it.  In the gold was set an onyx, graven with the monogram of Christ, a wreath, and the motto, ’Vivas in Deo.’  Marcus knelt, and pressed the seal to his forehead, murmuring ecstatically: 

‘The ring of a blessed martyr!’

‘I am all unworthy to wear it,’ said Basil, sincerely hesitating to replace it on his finger.  ’Indeed, I will not do so until I have spoken with the holy father.’

This resolve Marcus commended, and, with a kindly word, he went his way.  Basil worked on.  To discipline his thoughts he kept murmuring, ‘Vivas in Deo,’ and reflecting upon the significance of the words; for, often as he had seen them, he had never till now mused upon their meaning.  What was the life in God I Did it mean that of the world to come?  Ay, but how attain unto eternal blessedness save by striving to anticipate on earth that perfection of hereafter?  And so was he brought again to the conclusion that, would he assure life eternal, he must renounce all that lured him in mortality.

The brothers returning from the field at the third hour signalled to him that for to-day he had worked enough.  One of them, in passing, gave him a smile, and said good-naturedly: 

’Thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands; happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee.’

Weary, but with the sense of healthful fatigue, Basil rested for an hour on his bed.  He then took the Psalter and opened it at hazard, and the first words his eyes fell upon were: 

’Thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands; happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee.’

‘A happy omen,’ he thought.  But stay; what was this that followed?

’Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house; thy children like olive plants round about thy table.

‘Behold, thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord.’

The blood rushed into his cheeks.  He sat staring at the open page as though in astonishment.  He read and re-read the short psalm of which these verses were part, and if a voice had spoken it to him from above he could scarce have felt more moved by the message.  Basil had never been studious of the Scriptures, and, if ever he had known that they contained such matter as this, it had quite faded from his memory.  He thought of the Holy Book as hostile to every form of earthly happiness, its promises only for those who lived to mortify their natural desires.  Yet here was the very word of God encouraging him in his heart’s hope.  Were not men wont to use the Bible as their oracle, opening the pages at hazard, even as he had done?