widow would marry; and it was a terrible blow to the hapless Heliodora when nothing came of it—­she looks like a saint and is as soft as a kitten.  I was by when they parted, and she shed such bitter tears it was pitiable to see.  Still, she could not be angry with her idol, poor, gentle, tender kitten.  She even gave him her lap-dog for a keepsake—­that little silky thing you have seen here.  And take my word for it, that was a true love-token, for her heart was as much set on that little beast as if it had been her favorite child.  And he felt the parting too, felt it deeply; however, I am his confidential secretary, and it would never do for me to tell tales out of school.  He clasped the little dog to his heart as he bid her farewell, and he promised her to send some keepsake in return which should show her how precious her love had been—­and it will be no trifle, that any one may swear who knows my master.  You, Gamaliel, I daresay he has been to you about it by this time.”

The man thus addressed—­the same to whom Hiram was to offer Paula’s emerald—­was a rich Alexandrian of a happy turn of mind; as soon as the incursion of the Saracens had made Alexandria an unsafe residence, so that the majority of his fellow Israelites had fled from the great port, he had found his way to Memphis, where he could count on the protection of his patron, the Mukaukas George.

He shook his grizzled curls at this question, but he presently whispered in the secretary’s ear.  “We have the very thing he wants.  You bring me the cow and you shall have a calf—­and a calf with twelve legs too.  Is it a bargain?”

“Twelve per cent on the profits?  Done!” replied the secretary in the same tone, with a sly smile of intelligence.

When, by-and-bye, an accountant asked him why Orion had not brought home this fair dame, the bearer too of a noble name, to his parents as their daughter-in-law, he replied that, being a Greek, she was of course a Melchite.  Those present asked no better reason; as soon as the question of creed was raised the conversation, as usual in these convivial evenings, became a squabble over dogmatic differences; in the course of it a legal official ventured to opine that if the case had been that of a less personage than a son of the Mukaukas—­for whom it was, of course, out of the question—­of a mere Jacobite citizen and his Melchite sweetheart, for instance, some compromise might have been effected.  They need only have made up their minds each, respectively, to subscribe to the Monothelitic doctrine—­though, he, for his part, could have nothing to say to anything of the kind; it was warmly upheld by the Imperial court, and by Cyrus, the deceased patriarch of Alexandria, and was based on the assumption that there were indeed two natures in Christ, but both under the control of one and the same will.  By this dogma there were in the Saviour two persons no doubt; still it asserted His unity in a certain qualified sense, and this was the most important point.