“Take me with you,” entreated Sirona in a low tone.  “In my need I opened my heart to your good and loving God, and I will never more pray to any other.  The mere thought of Him strengthened and comforted me, and now, if ever, in this hour I need His merciful support.”

“My child, my daughter!” cried the deaconess, deeply moved; she bent over Sirona, kissed her forehead and her lips, and led her by the hand into her quiet sleeping-room.

“This is the place where I most love to pray,” she said, “although there is here no image and no altar.  My God is everywhere present and in every place I can find Him.”

The two women knelt down side by side, and both besought the same God for the same mercies—­not for themselves, but for another; and both in their sorrow could give thanks—­Sirona, because in Dorothea she had found a mother, and Dorothea, because in Sirona she had found a dear and loving daughter.

CHAPTER XXII.

Paulus was sitting in front of the cave that had sheltered Polykarp and Sirona, and he watched the torches whose light lessened as the bearers went farther and farther towards the valley.  They lighted the way for the wounded sculptor, who was being borne home to the oasis, lying in his mother’s easy litter, and accompanied by his father and his sister.

“Yet an hour,” thought the anchorite, “and the mother will have her son again, yet a week and Polykarp will rise from his bed, yet a year and he will remember nothing of yesterday but a scar—­and perhaps a kiss that he pressed on the Gaulish woman’s rosy lips.  I shall find it harder to forget.  The ladder which for so many years I had labored to construct, on which I thought to scale heaven, and which looked to me so lofty and so safe, there it lies broken to pieces, and the hand that struck it down was my own weakness.  It would almost seem as if this weakness of mine had more power than what we call moral strength for that which it took the one years to build up, was wrecked by the other in a’ moment.  In weakness only am I a giant.”

Paulus shivered at these words, for he was cold.  Early in that morning when he had taken upon himself Hermas’ guilt he had abjured wearing his sheepskin; now his body, accustomed to the warm wrap, suffered severely, and his blood coursed with fevered haste through his veins since the efforts, night-watches, and excitement of the last few days.  He drew his little coat close around him with a shiver and muttered, “I feel like a sheep that has been shorn in midwinter, and my head burns as if I were a baker and had to draw the bread out of the oven; a child might knock me down, and my eyes are heavy.  I have not even the energy to collect my thoughts for a prayer, of which I am in such sore need.  My goal is undoubtedly the right one, but so soon as I seem to be nearing it, my weakness snatches it from me, as the wind swept back the fruit-laden boughs