Gorgo had looked lovingly at him while he spoke, and he, pressing her hand to his lips went on with ardent feeling: 

“Yes, you shall be mine—­I dare, and I will go to ask you of your father.  There are some words spoken in one’s life which can never be forgotten.  Once your father said that he wished that I was his son.  On the march, in camp, in battle, wherever I have wandered, those words have been in my mind; for me they could have but one meaning:  I would be his son—­I shall be his son when Gorgo is my wife!—­And now the time has come . . .”

“Not yet, not to-day,” she interrupted eagerly.  “My hopes are the same as yours.  I believe with you that our love can bring all that is sweetest into our lives.  What you believe I must believe, and I will never urge upon you the things that I regard as holiest.  I can give up much, bear much, and it will all seem easy for your sake.  We can agree, and settle what shall be conceded to your Christ and what to our gods—­but not to-day; not even to-morrow.  For the present let me first carry out the task I have undertaken—­when that is done and past, then. . . .  You have my heart, my love; but if I were to prove a deserter from the cause to-day or to-morrow it would give others—­Olympius—­a right to point at me with scorn.”

“What is it then that you have undertaken?” asked Constantine with grave anxiety.

“To crown and close my past life.  Before I can say:  I am yours, wholly yours . . .”

“Are you not mine now, to-day, at once?” he urged.

“To day-no,” she replied firmly.  “The great cause still has a claim upon me; the cause which I must renounce for your sake.  But the woman who gives only one person reason to despise her signs the death-warrant of her own dignity.  I will carry out what I have undertaken. . . .  Do not ask me what it is; it would grieve you to know.—­The day after tomorrow, when the feast of Isis is over. . . .”

“Gorgo, Gorgo!” shouted Damia’s shrill voice, interrupting the young girl in her speech, and half a dozen slave-women came rushing out in search of her.

They rose, and as they went towards the house Constantine said very earnestly: 

“I will not insist; but trust my experience:  When we have to give something up sooner or later, if the wrench is a painful one, the sooner and the more definitely it is done the better.  Nothing is gained by postponement and the pain is only prolonged.  Hesitation and delay, Gorgo, are a barrier built up by your own hand between us and our happiness.  You always had abundance of determination; be brave then, now, and cut short at once a state of things that cannot last.”