Petrus had much loved his art, but he offered no resistance to his father’s orders; he followed him back to the oasis, there to superintend the work of the slaves who hewed the stone, to measure granite-blocks for sarcophagi and pillars, and to direct the cutting of them.  His father was a man of steel, and he himself a lad of iron, and when he saw himself compelled to yield to his father and to leave his master’s workshop, to abandon his cherished and unfinished work and to become an artizan and mail of business, he swore never again to take a piece of clay in his hand, or to wield a chisel.  And he kept his word even after his fathers death; but his creative instincts and love of art continued to live and work in him, and were transmitted to his two sons.

Antonius was a highly gifted artist, and if Polykarp’s master was not mistaken, and if he himself were not misled by fatherly affection, his second son was on the high road to the very first rank in art—­to a position reached only by elect spirits.

Petrus knew the models for the Good Shepherd and for the lions, and declared to himself that these last were unsurpassable in truth, power, and majesty.  How eagerly must the young artist long to execute them in hard stone, and to see them placed in the honored, though indeed pagan, spot, which was intended for them.  And now the bishop forbade him the work, and the poor fellow might well be feeling just as he himself had felt thirty years ago, when he had been commanded to abandon the immature first-fruits of his labor.

Was the bishop indeed right?  This and many other questions agitated the sleepless father, and as soon as he heard that his wife had risen from her bed to go to her son, whose footsteps he too could hear overhead, he got up and followed her.

He found the door of the work-room open, and, himself unseen and unheard, he was witness to his wife’s vehement speech, and to the lad’s justification, while Polykarp’s work stood in the full light of the lamps, exactly in front of him.

His gaze was spell-bound to the mass of clay; he looked and looked, and was not weary of looking, and his soul swelled with the same awe-struck sense of devout admiration that it had experienced, when for the first time, in his early youth, he saw with his own eyes the works of the great old Athenian masters in the Caesareum.

And this head was his son’s work!

He stood there greatly overcome, his hands clasped together, holding his breath till his mouth was dry, and swallowing his tears to keep them from falling.  At the same time he listened with anxious attention, so as not to lose one word of Polykarp’s.

“Aye, thus and thus only are great works of art begotten,” said he to himself, “and if the Lord had bestowed on me such gifts as on this lad, no father, nay, no god, should have compelled me to leave my Ariadne unfinished.  The attitude of the body was not bad I should say—­but the head, the face—­Aye, the man who can mould such a likeness as that has his hand and eye guided by the holy spirits of art.  He who has done that head will be praised in the latter days together with the great Athenian masters—­and he-yes, he, merciful Heaven! he is my own beloved son!”