“Perhaps the good father may find some nook for me. I do not think his heart will be hard, even to me, a sinner. Come.”
He turned as if to lead the way, then paused and spoke to her again.
“Perpetua,” he said. “Your trust in the fool”—the girl noticed that he shuddered as he spoke, and she wondered—“your trust in the fool is not unwisely placed. In the name of that trust, ask me, I pray you, no questions of my past. Let us believe between us that the fool Diogenes”—and again the convulsive shudder wrung him—“was newly born to-day.”
“I will do as you wish,” she answered, full of amazement at the change which had come to his warped wits.
He took her hand and guided her through the streets of Syracuse to the little church by the sea. The moon shone brightly on them as they went, the moon which swayed Syracuse, making lovers kiss, poets dream, philosophers sigh, children sport, dogs bay. It guided them, benignly, to their goal.
XIII
THE CHURCH BY THE SEA
The moon which had shone upon the flight of Perpetua had waxed and waned, and her successor ruled the night in the pride of her first quarter. Early one morning in the new month one of Lycabetta’s women, Lysidice, amber-haired, slender-limbed, with eyes like sapphires, was wandering in the flower-market of Syracuse, seeking the loveliest blooms for her mistress. Lycabetta loved Lysidice above her fellows, for her slim, boyish body, for her quaint, virginal air; she had not yet tired of the morning sport when Lysidice came from the flower-market and pelted her with many colored blossoms. So as Lysidice, eager to please, went hither and thither, seeking ever the best, her attention was attracted by the sight of a man in a friar’s robe, who was buying white roses at a stall. Though friars did not often buy roses in the Syracuse flower-market, the thing was not in itself passing strange, but the fancy of Lysidice, arrested at first by the contrast between the friar in his humble robe, with all that it suggested of denial, and the glory of the brilliant blooms about him, noted that the friar kept his cowl so close about his face as to conceal it completely from view.