In all the world there was no other highway as beautiful.  It wound for five miles along the foot of the mountains, among gardens and villas, plantations of myrtles and mulberries, with wide outlooks over the valley of Orontes and the distant, shimmering sea.

The richest of all the dwellings was the House of the Golden Pillars, the mansion of Demetrius.  He had won the favor of the apostate Emperor Julian, whose vain efforts to restore the worship of the heathen gods, some twenty years ago, had opened an easy way to wealth and power for all who would mock and oppose Christianity.  Demetrius was not a sincere fanatic like his royal master; but he was bitter enough in his professed scorn of the new religion, to make him a favourite at the court where the old religion was in fashion.  He had reaped a rich reward of his policy, and a strange sense of consistency made him more fiercely loyal to it than if it had been a real faith.  He was proud of being called “the friend of Julian”; and when his son joined himself to the Christians, and acknowledged the unseen God, it seemed like an insult to his father’s success.  He drove the boy from his door and disinherited him.

The glittering portico of the serene, haughty house, the repose of the well-ordered garden, still blooming with belated flowers, seemed at once to deride and to invite the young outcast plodding along the dusty road.  “This is your birthright,” whispered the clambering rose-trees by the gate; and the closed portals of carven bronze said:  “You have sold it for a thought—­a dream.”

II

A CHRISTMAS LOSS

Hermas found the Grove of Daphne quite deserted.  There was no sound in the enchanted vale but the rustling of the light winds chasing each other through the laurel thickets, and the babble of innumerable streams.  Memories of the days and nights of delicate pleasure that the grove had often seen still haunted the bewildered paths and broken fountains.  At the foot of a rocky eminence, crowned with the ruins of Apollo’s temple, which had been mysteriously destroyed by fire just after Julian had restored and reconsecrated it, Hermas sat down beside a gushing spring, and gave himself up to sadness.

“How beautiful the world would be, how joyful, how easy to live in, without religion.  These questions about unseen things, perhaps about unreal things, these restraints and duties and sacrifices—­if I were only free from them all, and could only forget them all, then I could live my life as I pleased, and be happy.”

“Why not?” said a quiet voice at his back.

He turned, and saw an old man with a long beard and a threadbare cloak (the garb affected by the pagan philosophers) standing behind him and smiling curiously.

“How is it that you answer that which has not been spoken?” said Hermas; “and who are you that honour me with your company?”