affection, you would understand just as well how I know no difference between them." 

 "It is strange; yet as you tell it, little friend, it is not strange," he returned, seriously. They were at the instant in a bar of brightest sunlight projected across the road; and had she asked him the cause of the frown on his face, he could not have told her he was thinking of Demedes. 

 "Yes, I see it—I see it, and congratulate you upon being so doubly blessed. Tell me next who the Prince of India is." 

 She looked now here, now there, he watching her narrowly. 

 "Oh! I never thought of asking him about himself." 

 She was merely puzzled by an unexpected question. 

 "But you know something of him?" 

 "Let me think," she replied. "Yes, he was the intimate of my father Uel's father, and of his father before him." 

 "Is he so old then?" 

 "I cannot say how long he has been a family acquaintance. Of my knowledge he is very learned in everything. He speaks all the languages I ever heard of; he passes the nights alone on the roof of his house"— 

 "Alone on the roof of his house!" 

 "Only of clear nights, you understand. A servant carries a chair and table up for him, and a roll of papers, with pen and ink, and a clock of brass and gold. The paper is a map of the heavens; and he sits there watching the stars, marking them in position on the map, the clock telling him the exact time." 

 "An astronomer," said Sergius. 

 "And an astrologer," she added; "and besides these things he is a doctor, but goes only amongst the poor, taking nothing from them. He is also a chemist; and he has tables of the plants curative and deadly, and can extract their qualities, and reduce them from fluids to solids, and proportionate them. He is also a master of figures, a science, he always terms it, the first of creative principles without which God could not be God. So, too, he is a traveller—indeed I think he has been over the known world. You cannot speak of a capital or of an 

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