She had exchanged but few words with the physician, who was still unceasingly busy in trying to restore his patient to consciousness, and who had assured her that he had every hope of her father's recovery.
But at length the girl looked up with an eager gaze and said, sadly enough: "You said something about an antidote to poison, Apuleius?
Then my father tried to escape the final destruction by attempting to kill himself .-- Is it so ?" The leech looked at her keenly, and after confirming her suspicion and explaining to her exactly how the fateful deed had been accomplished, he went on: "The storm had completely unnerved him--it unmanned us all--and yet that was only the prelude to the tremendous doom which is hanging over the universe.

It is at hand; we can hear its approach; the stones are yielding! the Christian's engines are opening the way for it to enter!" Apuleius spoke in a tone of sinister foreboding, and the falling stones dislodged by the battering-ram thundered a solemn accompaniment to his prophecy.

Gorgo, turned pale; but it was not the physician's ominous speech that alarmed her, but the quaking of the walls of the room.
Still, the Serapeum was built for eternity; the ram might bring down a wall, but it could not destroy or even shake the building itself.
Outside, the hubbub of fighting men grew louder and louder every minute, and Apuleius, increasingly anxious, went to the door to listen.

Gorgo could see that his hands trembled! he--a man--was frightened, while she felt no anxiety but for her suffering father! Through that breach Constantine would enter--and where he commanded she was safe.

As to the destruction of the universe--she no longer believed in it.