Entering his tent, he trimmed the lamp with a pair of snuffers. Rolls of parchment and the Gospels lay around him on the ground in disorder. He began to write his favourite work, Against the Christians, begun two months previously at the opening of the campaign. Reclining, with his back turned to the tent door, Julian was re-reading the manuscript, when suddenly he heard a slight noise.
He turned round, uttered a cry, and sprang to his feet. He thought he saw a ghost. On the threshold stood a youth, clothed in a ragged brown garment of camel's hair; a dusty sheepskin, the "melotes" of the Egyptian anchorites, flung over his shoulders. His bare feet were shod in sandals of palmwood.
The Emperor scanned him, waiting, unable to pronounce a word.
"Do you remember," said a well-known voice. "Do you remember, Julian, how you came to me in the convent? Then I repulsed you. But I have not been able to forget you, because we are singularly like each other, singularly near each other...."
The lad threw back his black hood, Julian saw the bright brown hair, and recognised Arsinoë.
"Whence—why have you come? Why are you clad thus?"
He still feared lest this might be some spirit, which would vanish as unexpectedly as it had appeared.
In a few words Arsinoë narrated to him her fortunes since their last parting.
After leaving her guardian Hortensius and giving the greater part of her wealth to the poor, she had long lodged with the anchorites to the south of Lake Mareotis, west of the Nile, among the sterile mountains of Libya, in the terrible Nitrian and Sciathian deserts. She had been accompanied by the young Juventinus, the disciple of old Didimus. They had been taught daily by the ascetics.
"And then," asked Julian, not without a certain apprehension, "and then, girl, did you find among them what you were seeking for?"