‘Then you knew where to find us?’ said Victoria.
‘Some of them knew. And he himself showed us this very by-road yesterday, when we took up our ground, and told us it might be of service on occasion—and so it has been.’
‘But they told me that you were taken prisoner. Oh, the torture I have suffered for you!’
‘Silly child! Did you fancy my father’s son would be taken alive? I and the first troop got away over the garden walls, and cut our way out into the plain, three hours ago.’
‘Did I not tell you,’ said Victoria, leaning toward Raphael, ‘that God would protect His own?’
‘You did,’ answered he; and fell into a long and silent meditation.
CHAPTER XIV: THE ROCKS OF THE SIRENS
THESE four months had been busy and eventful enough to Hypatia and to Philammon; yet the events and the business were of so gradual and uniform a tenor, that it is as well to pass quickly over them, and show what had happened principally by its effects.
The robust and fiery desert-lad was now metamorphosed into the pale and thoughtful student, oppressed with the weight of careful thought and weary memory. But those remembrances were all recent ones. With his entrance into Hypatia’s lecture-room, and into the fairy realms of Greek thought, a new life had begun for him; and the Laura, and Pambo, and Arsenius, seemed dim phantoms from some antenatal existence, which faded day by day before the inrush of new and startling knowledge.