CHAPTER 6.
AN APPRENTICESHIP TO THE TEMPLE.
The action of our characters during the night included in the last two chapters has now come to a pause.

Vetranio is awaiting his guests for the banquet; Numerian is in the chapel, preparing for the discourse that he is to deliver to his friends; Ulpius is meditating in his master's house; Antonina is stretched upon her couch, caressing the precious fragment that she had saved from the ruins of her lute.

All the immediate agents of our story are, for the present, in repose.
It is our purpose to take advantage of this interval of inaction, and direct the reader's attention to a different country from that selected as the scene of our romance, and to such historical events of past years as connect themselves remarkably with the early life of Numerian's perfidious convert.

This man will be found a person of great importance in the future conduct of our story.

It is necessary to the comprehension of his character, and the penetration of such of his purposes as have been already hinted at, and may subsequently appear, that the long course of his existence should be traced upwards to its source.
It was in the reign of Julian, when the gods of the Pagan achieved their last victory over the Gospel of the Christian, that a decently attired man, leading by the hand a handsome boy of fifteen years of age, entered the gates of Alexandria, and proceeded hastily towards the high priest's dwelling in the Temple of Serapis.
After a stay of some hours at his destination, the man left the city alone as hastily as he entered it, and was never after seen at Alexandria.