The way lay through a parched tract of rocky desert, and the further they went the more intense was that wonderful flush in the west, till day broke behind the travellers and the glory of the sunrise quenched the vividness of its glow.

Another scorching day!  The rocks by the wayside still threw long shadows on the sandy desert-road, when a party of Arab horsemen came from Fostat to meet the travellers, shouting the latest news to the prisoner’s escort.  It was evidently important; but Orion did not understand a word of what they said.  Evil tidings fly fast, however; while the men were talking together, the dragoman rode up to him and told him that his home was burnt to the ground and half Memphis still in flames.  Then came other newsbearers, on horseback and on dromedaries; and they met chariots and files of camels loaded with corn and Egyptian merchandise; and each and all shouted to the Arab escort reports of what was going on in Memphis, hoping to be the first to tell the homeward bound party.

How many times did Orion hear the story—­and each time that a traveller began with:  “Have you heard?” pointing westward, the wounds the first news had inflicted bled anew.

What lay beneath that mass of ashes?  How much had the flames consumed that never could be replaced!  Much that he had silently wished were possible had in fact been fulfilled—­and so soon!  Where now was the burthen of great wealth which had hung about his heels and hindered his running freely?  And yet he did not, even now, feel free; the way was not yet open before him; he secretly mourned over the ruined house of his fathers and the wrecked home; a miserable sense of insecurity weighed him down.  No father—­no mother-no parental roof!  For years he had been, in fact, perfectly independent, and yet he felt now like a pilot whose boat had lost its rudder.

Before him lay a prison, and the closing act of the great tragedy of which he himself had been the hero.  Fate had fallen on his house, had marked it for destruction as erewhile that of Tantalus.  It lay in ashes, and the victims were already many:  two brothers, father, mother—­and, far away from home, Rufinus too.

But whose was the guilt?

It was not his ancestors who had sinned; it could only be his own that had called down this ruin.  But was there then such a power as the Destiny of the ancients—­inexorable, iron Fate?  Had he not repented and suffered, been reconciled to his Redeemer, and prepared himself to fight the hard fight?  Perhaps he was indeed to be the hero of a tragedy; then he would show that it was not the blind Inevitable, but what a man can make of himself, and what he can do by the aid of the God of might, which determines his fate.  If he must still succumb, it should only be after a valiant struggle and defense.  He would battle fearlessly against every foe, would press onward in the path he had laid down for himself.  His heart beat high once more; he felt as though he could see his father’s example as a guiding star in the sky, so that he must be true to that whether to live or to die.  And when he turned his eye earthwards again, still, even there, he had that which made it seem worth the cost of enduring the pangs of living and the brunt of the hardest battle:  Paula and her love.