Two thirds of a century lay between that happy and terrible time, and the present.

He had been dead many a long year, and still she remembered him, and was thinking of him even now.

A singular effort of fancy showed her herself, as she had then been, and Gorgo--whom she saw not with her bodily eyes, though the girl was standing in front of her--two young creatures side by side.

The two were but one in her vision; the same anguish that embittered one life now threatened the other.

But after all she, Damia, had dragged this grief after her through the weary decades, like the iron ball at the end of a chain which keeps the galley-slave to his place at the oar, and from which he can no more escape than from a ponderous and ever-present shadow; and Gorgo's sorrow could not at any rate be for long, since the end of all things was at hand--it was coming slowly but with inevitable certainty, nearer and nearer every hour.
When had a troop of enthusiastic students and hastily-collected peasant-soldiers ever been able to snake an effectual stand against the hosts of Rome?
Damia, who only a few minutes since had spoken with such determined encouragement to her son, had terrible visions of the Imperial legions putting Olympius to rout, with the Libyans under Barkas and the Biamite rabble under Pachomius; storming the Serapeum and reducing it to ruin: Firebrands flying through its sacred halls, the roof giving way, the vaults falling in; the sublime image of the god--the magnificent work of Bryaxis--battered by a hail of stones, and sinking to mingle with the reeking dust.