She felt that she was very superior to Hermas, and her position was now too grave a one for her to feel inclined to play any more.  She thought indeed of Petrus and Dorothea, but she could only reach them by going back to the oasis, and then she feared to be discovered by Phoebicius.

If Polykarp now could only meet her on his way back from Raithu; but the road she had just quitted did not lead from thence, but to the gate-way that lay more to the southwards.

The senator’s son loved her—­of that she was sure, for no one else had ever looked into her eyes with such deep delight, or such tender affection; and he was no inexperienced boy, but a right earnest man, whose busy and useful life now appeared to her in a quite different light to that in which she had seen it formerly.  How willingly now would she have allowed herself to be supported and guided by Polykarp!  But how could she reach him?  No—­even from him there was nothing to be expected; she must rely upon her own strength, and she decided that so soon as the morning should blush, and the sun begin to mount in the cloudless sky, she would keep herself concealed during the day, among the mountains, and then as evening came on, she would go down to the sea, and endeavor to get on board a vessel to Klysma and thence reach Alexandria.  She wore a ring with a finely cut onyx on her finger, elegant ear-rings in her ears, and on her left arm a bracelet.  These jewels were of virgin gold, and besides these she had with her a few silver coins and one large gold piece, that her father had given her as token out of his small store, when she had quitted him for Rome, and that she had hitherto preserved as carefully as if it were a talisman.

She pressed the token, which was sewn into a little bag, to her lips, and thought of her paternal home, and her brothers and sisters.

Meanwhile the sun mounted higher and higher:  she wandered from rock to rock in search of a shady spot and a spring of water, but none was to be found, and she was tormented with violent thirst and aching hunger.  By mid-day the strips of shade too had vanished, where she had found shelter from the rays of the sun, which now beat down unmercifully on her un protected head.  Her forehead and neck began to tingle violently, and she fled before the burning beams like a soldier before the shafts of his pursuer.  Behind the rocks which hemmed in the plateau on which Paulus met her, at last, when she was quite exhausted, she found a shady resting-place.  The greyhound lay panting in her lap, and held up its broken paw, which she had carefully bound up in the morning when she had first sat down to rest, with a strip of stuff that she had torn with the help of her teeth from her under-garment.  She now bound it up afresh, and nursed the little creature, caressing it like an infant.  The dog was as wretched and suffering as herself, and besides it was the only being that, in spite of her helplessness, she could cherish and