“You are speaking of my mother, remember!” cried Marcus, looking at his brother with a touching appeal in his eyes.  Demetrius shook his shaggy head and spoke more temperately as he went on: 

“Yes, child, I had forgotten that—­and I may be mistaken of course, for I am no more than human.  Here one thing follows so close on another, and in this house I feel so battered and storm-tossed, that I hardly know myself.  But old Phabis tells me that steps are being seriously taken to procure the title of Martyr for our father Apelles.”

“My mother is quite convinced that he died for the faith, and she loved him devotedly . . .”

“Then it is so!” cried Demetrius, grinding his teeth and thumping his fist down on the table.  “The lies sown by one single man have produced a deadly weed that is smothering this miserable house!  You—­to be sure, what can you know of our father?  I knew him; I have been present when he and his friends, the philosophers, have laughed to scorn things which not only you Christians but even pious heathen regard as sacred.  Lucretius was his evangelist, and the Cosmogony of that utter atheist lay by his pillow and was his companion wherever he went.”

“He admired the heathen poets, but he was a Christian all the same,” replied Marcus.

“Neither more nor less than Porphyrius, our uncle, or myself,” retorted his brother.  “Since the day when our grandfather Philippus was baptized, wealth and happiness have deserted this house.  He gave up the old gods solely that he might not lose the right of supplying the city and the Emperor with corn, and became a Christian and made his sons Christians.  But he had us educated by his heathen friends, and though we passed for Christians we were not so in fact.  When it was absolutely necessary he showed himself in church with us; but our daily life, our pleasures, our pastimes were heathen, and when life began for us in earnest we offered a bleeding sacrifice to the gods.  It was impossible to retract honestly, since a renegade Christian returning to the worship of the old gods is incapacitated by law from making a will.  You know this; and when you ask me why I am content to live alone, without either wife or child—­and I love children, even those of other people—­a solitary man dragging out my days and nights joylessly enough—­I tell you:  I am openly and honestly a worshipper of our old gods, and I will not go to church because I scorn a lie.  What should I do with children who, in consequence of my retractation, must forfeit all I might leave them?  It was this question of inheritance only that induced my father to have us baptized and to make a pretense of Christianity.  He set out for Petra with his Lucretius in his satchel—­I packed it with my own hands into his money-bag—­to put in a claim to supply grain to the ‘Rock city.’  He was slain on his way. home; most likely by his servant Anubis, who certainly knew what money he had with him, and who vanished and left no