What a strange dream! The sun and the exertion must have made him giddy.

He would forget all about it.
Weary with labour, and still wearier with thought, he returned that evening, longing and yet dreading to be permitted to speak with Hypatia.
He half hoped at moments that Cyril might think him too weak for it; and the next, all his pride and daring, not to say his faith and hope, spurred him on.

Might he but face the terrible enchantress, and rebuke her to her face! And yet so lovely, so noble as she looked! Could he speak to her, except in tones of gentle warning, pity, counsel, entreaty?
Might he not convert her--save her?
Glorious thought! to win such a soul to the true cause! To be able to show, as the firstfruits of his mission, the very champion of heathendom! It was worth while to have lived only to do that; and having done it, to die.
The archbishop's lodgings, when he entered them, were in a state of ferment even greater than usual.

Groups of monks, priests, parabolani, and citizens rich and poor, were banging about the courtyard, talking earnestly and angrily.

A large party of monks fresh from Nitria, with ragged hair and beards, and the peculiar expression of countenance which fanatics of all creeds acquire, fierce and yet abject, self-conscious and yet ungoverned, silly and yet sly, with features coarsened and degraded by continual fasting and self-torture, prudishly shrouded from head to heel in their long ragged gowns, were gesticulating wildly and loudly, and calling on their more peaceable companions, in no measured terms, to revenge some insult offered to the Church.
'What is the matter ?' asked Philammon of a quiet portly citizen, who stood looking up, with a most perplexed visage, at the windows of the patriarch's apartments.
'Don't ask me; I have nothing to do with it.