“In spite of this I am no saint.  I have committed many a folly, many an injustice; and much of my goods and gold, which I should perhaps have done better to save for my family, has slipped through my fingers, though in the execution, no doubt, of what I deemed the highest duties.  Would you believe it, Paula?—­Forgive an old man for such fatherly familiarity with the daughter of Thomas;—­hardly five years after my marriage with this good wife, not long after we had lost our only son, I left her and our little daughter, Pul there, for more than two years, to follow the Emperor Heraclius of my own free will to the war against the Persians who had done me no harm—­not, indeed, as a soldier, but as a surgeon eager for experience.  To confess the truth I was quite as eager to see and treat fractures and wounds and injuries in great numbers, as I was to exercise benevolence.  I came home with a broken hip-bone, tolerably patched up, and again, a few years later, I could not keep still in one place.  The bird of passage must need drag wife and child from the peace of hearth and homestead, and take them to where he could go to the high school.  A husband, a father, and already grey-headed, I was a singular exception among the youths who sat listening to the lectures and explanations of their teachers; but as sure as man is the standard of all things, they none of them outdid me in diligence and zeal, though many a one was greatly my superior in gifts and intellect, and among them the foremost was our friend Philippus.  Thus it came about, noble Paula, that the old man and the youth in his prime were fellow-students; but to this day the senior gladly bows down to his young brother in learning and feeling.  To straighten, to comfort, and to heal:  this is the aim of his life too.  And even I, an old man, who started long before Philippus on the same career, often long to call myself his disciple.”

Here Rufinus paused and rose; Paula, too, got up, grasped his hand warmly, and said: 

“If I were a man, I would join you!  But Philippus has told me that even a woman may be allowed to work with the same purpose.—­And now let me beg of you never to call me anything but Paula—­you will not refuse me this favor.  I never thought I could be so happy again as I am with you; here my heart is free and whole.  Dame Joanna, do you be my mother!  I have lost the best of fathers, and till I find him again, you, Rufinus, must fill his place!”

“Gladly, gladly!” cried the old man; he clasped both her hands and went on vivaciously:  “And in return I ask you to be an elder sister to Pul.  Make that timid little thing such a maiden as you are yourself.—­But look, children, look up quickly; it is beginning!—­Typhon, in the form of a boar, is swallowing the eye of Horns:  so the heathen of old in this country used to believe when the moon suffered an eclipse.  See how the shadow is covering the bright disk.  When the ancients saw this happening they used to make a noise,