And her hosts—­what kind-hearted though singular folks! nay, in their way, remarkable.  She had never dreamed that there could be on earth any beings at once so odd and so lovable.

First there was old Rufinus, the head of the house, a vigorous, hale old man, who, with his long silky, snow-white hair and beard, looked something like the aged St. John and something like a warrior grown grey in service.  What an amiable spirit of childlike meekness he had, in spite of the rough ways he sometimes fell into.  Though inclined to be contradictory in his intercourse with his fellow-men, he was merry and jocose when his views were opposed to theirs.  She had never met a more contented soul or a franker disposition, and she could well understand how much it must fret and gall such a man to live on,—­day after day, appearing, in one respect at any rate, different from what he really was.  For he, too, belonged to her confession; but, though he sent his wife and daughter to worship in the convent chapel, he himself was compelled to profess himself a Coptic Christian, and submit to the necessity of attending a Jacobite church with all his family on certain holy days, averse as he was to its unattractive form of worship.

Rufinus possessed a sufficient fortune to secure him a comfortable maintenance; and yet he was hard at work, in his own way, from morning till night.  Not that his labors brought him any revenues; on the contrary, they led to claims on his resources; every one knew that he was a man of good means, and this would have certainly involved him in persecution if the Patriarch’s spies had discovered him to be a Melchite, resulting in exile and probably the confiscation of his goods.  Hence it was necessary to exercise caution, and if the old man could have found a purchaser for his house and garden, in a city where there were ten times as many houses empty as occupied, he would long since have set out with all his household to seek a new home.

Most aged people of vehement spirit and not too keen intellect, adopt a saying as a stop-gap or resting-place, and he was fond of using two phrases one of which ran:  “As sure as man is the standard of all things” and the other—­referring to his house—­“As sure as I long to be quit of this lumber.”  But the lumber consisted of a well-built and very spacious dwellinghouse, with a garden which had commanded a high price in earlier times on account of its situation near the river.  He himself had acquired it at very small cost shortly before the Arab incursion, and—­so quickly do times change—­he had actually bought it from a Jacobite Christian who had been forced by the Melchite Patriarch Cyrus, then in power, to fly in haste because he had found means to convert his orthodox slaves to his confession.

It was Philippus who had persuaded his accomplished and experienced friend to come to Memphis; he had clung to him faithfully, and they assisted each other in their works.