After Selene had once expressed to the widow her desire to be a Christian, Hannah brought the bishop to see her.  He himself undertook to instruct the girl and he found in her a disciple anxious and craving for knowledge.  Just like those dried-up and dull-colored plants which, when they are plunged in water, open out and revive, so did her heart, untimely withered and dry; and she longed to be perfectly recovered that she, like Hannah, might tend the sick and exercise that love which Christ demands of His followers.  That which most particularly appealed to her in her new faith was that it did not promise joys to the rich who could make great sacrifices, but to the miserable sinner who with a contrite heart yearned for forgiveness, to the poor and abject, towards whom she felt as though they belonged to the same family as herself.  And her valiant spirit could not be satisfied with intentions but longed to act upon them.  In Besa she could set to work with Hannah, and this prospect lightened her grief in quitting Alexandria.

A favoring wind bore the voyagers southward safe to their destination.

Two days after their departure Antinous once more stole into Paulina’s garden.  He went up to the widow’s little house looking in vain for the deformed girl; the road was open; her absence could but be pleasing to him, and yet it disquieted him.  His heart beat wildly, for to-day—­perhaps he might find Selene alone.  He opened the door without knocking, but he dared not cross the threshold, for in the anteroom stood a strange man, placing boards against the wall.  The carpenter, a Christian to whom Paulina had given this little house for his family to live in, asked Antinous what he wanted.

“Is dame Hannah at home?” stammered the Bithynian.

“She no longer lives here.”

“And her adopted daughter, Selene?”

“She is gone with her into Upper Egypt.  Have you any message for her?”

“No,” said the lad, quite confounded.

“When did they go?”

“The day before yesterday.”

“And they are not coming back.”

“For the next few years, certainly not.  Later may be, if it is the Lord’s pleasure.”

Antinous left the garden by the public gate, unmolested.  He was very pale, and he felt like a wanderer in the desert who finds the spring choked where he had hoped to find a refreshing draught.

Next day, at the first moment he could dispose of, Antinous again knocked at the carpenter’s door to inquire in what town of Upper Egypt the travellers proposed to settle and the artisan told him frankly, “In Besa.”

Antinous had always been a dreamer, but Hadrian had never seen him so listless, so vaguely brooding as in these days.  When he tried to rouse him and spur him to greater energy his favorite would look at him beseechingly, and though he made every effort to be of use to him and to show him a cheerful countenance it was always with but brief success.  Even on the hunting excursions into the Libyan desert which the Emperor frequently made, Antinous remained apathetic and indifferent to the pleasures of the sport to which he had formerly devoted himself with enjoyment and skill.