Firmly resolved to carry out her threat she stepped towards the figure, but Polykarp placed himself in her way, raising his arm imploringly to defend it, and saying, “Not to-day—­not yet, mother!  I will cover it up, and will not look at it again till to-morrow, but once—­only once—­I must see it again by sunlight.”

“So that to-morrow the old madness may revive in you!” cried Dorothea.  “Move out of my way or take the hammer yourself.”

“You order it, and you are my mother,” said Polykarp.

He slowly went up to the chest in which his tools and instruments lay, and bitter tears ran down his cheeks, as he took his heaviest hammer in his hand.

When the sky has shown for many days in summer-blue, and then suddenly the clouds gather for a storm, when the first silent but fearful flash with it noisy but harmless associate the thunder-clap has terrified the world, a second and third thunder-bolt immediately follow.  Since the stormy night of yesterday had broken in on the peaceful, industrious, and monotonous life by the senator’s hearth, many things had happened that had filled him and his wife with fresh anxiety.

In other houses it was nothing remarkable that a slave should run away, but in the senator’s it was more than twenty years since such a thing had occurred, and yesterday the goat-herd Miriam had disappeared.  This was vexatious, but the silent sorrow of his son Polykarp was a greater anxiety to Petrus.  It did not please him that the youth, who was usually so vehement, should submit unresistingly and almost indifferently to the Bishop Agapitus, who prohibited his completing his lions.  His son’s sad gaze, his crushed and broken aspect were still in his mind when at last he went to rest for the night; it was already late, but sleep avoided him even as it had avoided Dorothea.  While the mother was thinking of her son’s sinful love and the bleeding wound in his young and betrayed heart, the father grieved for Polykarp’s baffled hopes of exercising his art on a great work and recalled the saddest, bitterest day of his own youth; for he too had served his apprenticeship under a sculptor in Alexandria, had looked up to the works of the heathen as noble models, and striven to form himself upon them.  He had already been permitted by his master to execute designs of his own, and out of the abundance of subjects which offered themselves, he had chosen to model an Ariadne, waiting and longing for the return of Thescus, as a symbolic image of his own soul awaiting its salvation.  How this work had filled his mind! how delightful had the hours of labor seemed to him!—­when, suddenly, his stern father had come to the city, had seen his work before it was quite finished, and instead of praising it had scorned it; had abused it as a heathen idol, and had commanded Petrus to return home with him immediately, and to remain there, for that his son should be a pious Christian, and a good stone-mason withal—­not half a heathen, and a maker of false gods.