“And why not?” asked Dorothea.  “When you graft a scion on to a tree, and they have grown well together, the grafted branch feels the bite of the saw that divides the stock, or the blessing of the spring that feeds the roots, just as if the pain or the boon were its own.  And you are the tree and I am the graft, and the magic power of marriage has made us one.  Your pulses are my pulses, your thoughts have become mine, and so I always know before you tell me what it is that stirs your soul.”

Dorothea’s kind eyes moistened as she spoke, and Petrus warmly clasped her hands in his as he said, “And if the gnarled old trunk bears from time to time some sweet fruit, he may thank the graft for it.  I cannot believe that the anchorites up yonder are peculiarly pleasing to the Lord because they live in solitude.  Man comes to his perfect humanity only through his wife and child, and he who has them not, can never learn the most glorious heights and the darkest depths of life and feeling.  If a man may stake his whole existence and powers for anything, surely it is for his own house.”

“And you have honestly done so for ours!” cried Dorothea.

“For ours,” repeated Petrus, giving the words the strongest accent of his deep voice.  Two are stronger than one, and it is long since we ceased to say ‘I’ in discussing any question concerning the house or the children; and both have been touched by to-day’s events.”

“The senate will not support you in constructing the road?”

“No, the bishop gave the casting-vote.  I need not tell you how we stand towards each other, and I will not blame him; for he is a just man, but in many things we can never meet half-way.  You know that he was in his youth a soldier, and his very piety is rough—­I might almost say warlike.  If we had yielded to his views, and if our head man Obedianus had not supported me, we should not have had a single picture in the church, and it would have looked like a barn rather than a house of prayer.  We never have understood each other, and since I opposed his wish of making Polykarp a priest, and sent the boy to learn of the sculptor Thalassius—­for even as a child he drew better than many masters in these wretched days that produce no great artists—­since then, I say, he speaks of me as if I were a heathen—­”

“And yet he esteems you highly, that I know,” interrupted Dame Dorothea.

“I fully return his good opinion,” replied Petrus, “and it is no ordinary matter that estranges.  He thinks that he only holds the true faith, and ought to fight for it; he calls all artistic work a heathen abomination; he never felt the purifying influence of the beautiful, and regards all pictures and statues as tending to idolatry.  Still he allows himself to admire Polykarp’s figures of angels and the Good Shepherd, but the lions put the old warrior in a rage.  ‘Accursed idols and works of the devil,’ are what he calls them.”