"He would not have anything to eat; he never will," said the mother.
"Sit down there," ordered Paul, "you must eat. Mother, give him something."
It was not the first time that Antiochus had sat at the priest's table, so he obeyed without shyness, though his heart beat fast. He was aware somehow that his position had changed, that the priest was speaking to him in a way different from usual; he could not explain how or why, he only felt there was a difference. He looked up in Paul's face as though he saw him for the first time, with mingled fear and joy. Fear and joy and a whole throng of new emotions, gratitude, hope and pride, filled his heart as a nest full of warm fledglings ready to spread their wings and fly away.
"Then at two o'clock you must come for your lesson. It is time to set to work seriously with Latin; and I must write for a new grammar, mine is centuries old."
Antiochus had stopped eating: now he went very red and offered his services enthusiastically without inquiring the why or the wherefore. The priest looked at him with a smile, then turned his face to the window, through which the trees could be seen waving against the clear sky, and his thoughts were evidently far away. Antiochus felt again as if he had been dismissed and his spirits fell; he brushed the crumbs from the tablecloth, folded his napkin carefully and carried the cups into the kitchen. He prepared to wash up, too, and would have done it very well, for he was accustomed to washing glasses in his mother's wine-shop; but the priest's mother would not allow it.
"Go to the church and get ready," she whispered, pushing him away. He went out immediately, but before going to the church he ran round to his mother to warn her to have the house clean and tidy as the priest was coming to see her.
Meanwhile the priest's mother had gone back into the dining-room, where Paul was still idling at the table with a newspaper in front of him. Usually, when he was at home, he sat in his own room, but this morning he was afraid of going up there again. He sat reading the newspaper, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He was thinking of the old dying hunter, who had once confessed to him that he shunned the company of men because "they are evil itself," and men in mockery had called him King, as they had called Christ King of the Jews. But Paul was not interested in the old man's confession; his thoughts turned rather to Antiochus and his father and mother, for he meant to ask the latter whether they conscientiously realized what they were doing in allowing the boy to have his own way and carry out his unreasoning fancy for becoming a priest. But even this was really of little importance: what Paul actually wanted was to get away from his own thoughts, and when his mother came into the room he bowed his head over his paper, for he knew that she alone could divine what those thoughts were.
He sat there with bowed head, but he forbade his lips to frame the question he longed to ask. The letter had been delivered; what more was there for him to know? The stone of the sepulchre had been rolled into its place: but ah! how it weighed upon him, how alive he felt, buried alive beneath that great stone!
His mother began to clear the table, putting each object back in the cupboard that served as a sideboard. It was so quiet that the birds could be heard chirping in the bushes and the regular tap-tap of the stone-breaker by the roadside. It seemed like the end of the world, as though the last habitation of living men was this little white room, with its time-blackened furniture and its tiled flooring, upon which the green and gold light from the high window cast a tremulous reflexion as of water and made the small place seem like some prison chamber in the dungeon of a castle.