Gorgo remained alone below.  From the adjoining workrooms came the monotonous rattle of the loom at which, as usual, a number of slaves were working.

Suddenly the clatter ceased.  Damia had sent a slave-girl down to say that they might leave off work and rest till next day if they chose.  She had ordered that wine should be distributed to them in the great hall, as freely as at the great festival of Dionysus.

All was silent in the Gynaeconitis.  The garlands of flowers, which Gorgo herself had helped some damsels of her acquaintance to twine for the temple of Isis, lay in a heap-the steward had told her that the venerable sanctuary was to be closed and surrounded by soldiers.  This then put an end to the festival; and she could have been heartily glad, for it relieved her of the necessity of defying Constantine; still, it was with tender melancholy that she thought of the gentle goddess in whose sanctuary she had so often found comfort and support.  She could remember, as a tiny child, gathering the first flowers in her little garden, and sticking them in the ground near the tank from which water was fetched for libations in the temple; with the pocketmoney given her by her elders, she had bought perfumes to pour on the altars of the divinity; and often when her heart was heavy she had found relief in prayer before the marble statue of the goddess.  How splendid had the festivals of Isis been, how gladly and rapturously had she sung in their honor!  Almost everything that had lent poetry and dignity to her childhood had been bound up with Isis and her sanctuary—­and now it was closed and the image of the divine mother was perhaps lying in fragments in the dirt!

Gorgo knew all the lofty ideals which lay at the foundation of the worship of this goddess; but it was not to them that she had turned for help, but to the image in whose mystical strength she trusted.  And what had already been done to Isis and her temple might soon be done to Serapis and to his house.

She could not bear the thought, for she had been accustomed to regard the Serapeum as the very heart of the universe—­the centre and fulcrum on which the balance of the earth depended; to her, Serapis himself was inseparable from his temple and its atmosphere of magical and mystical power.  Every prophecy, every Sibylline text, every oracle must be false if the overthrow of that image could remain unpunished—­if the destruction of the universe failed to follow, as surely as a, flood ensues from a breach in a dyke.  How indeed could it be otherwise, according to the explanation which her teacher had given her of the Neo-Platonic conception of the nature of the god?