Eurotas proceeded at once to the Numidian quarters in the palace, and asked for Jubala; who entered with two small flasks of different sizes, and was just going to give some explanations, when her husband, half-drunk, half-furious, was seen approaching. Eurotas had just time to conceal the flasks in his belt, and slip a coin into her hand, when Hyphax came up. His wife had mentioned to him the offers which Eurotas had made to her before marriage, and had excited in his hot African blood a jealousy that amounted to hatred. The savage rudely thrust his wife out of the apartment, and would have picked a quarrel with the Syrian; had not the latter, his purpose being accomplished, acted with forbearance, assured the archer-chief that he should never more see him, and retired. It is time, however, that we return to Fabiola. The reader is probably prepared to hear us say, that she returned home a Christian: and yet it was not so. For what as yet did she know of Christianity, to be said to profess it? In Sebastian and Agnes she had indeed willingly admired the virtue, unselfish, generous, and more than earthly, which now she was ready to attribute to that faith. She saw that it gave motives of actions, principles of life, elevation of mind, courage of conscience, and determination of virtuous will, such as no other system of belief ever bestowed. And even if, as she now shrewdly suspected, and intended in calmer moments to ascertain, the sublime revelations of Syra, concerning an unseen sphere of virtue, and its all-seeing Ruler, came from the same source, to what did it all amount more than to a grand moral and intellectual system, partly practical, partly speculative, as all codes of philosophic teaching were? This was a very different thing from Christianity. She had as yet heard nothing of its real and essential doctrines, its fathomless, yet accessible, depths of mystery; the awful, vast, and heaven-high structure of faith, which the simplest soul may contain; as a child’s eye will take in the perfect reflection and counterpart of a mountain, though a giant cannot scale it. She had never heard of a God, One in Trinity; of the co-equal Son incarnate for man. She had never been told of the marvellous history, of Redemption by God’s sufferings and death. She had not heard of Nazareth, or Bethlehem, or Calvary. How could she call herself a Christian, or be one, in ignorance of all this? How many names had to become familiar and sweet to her which as yet were unknown, or barbarous--Mary, Joseph, Peter, Paul, and John? Not to mention the sweetest of all, His, whose name is balm to the wounded heart, or as honey dropping from the broken honeycomb. And how much had she yet to learn about the provision for salvation on earth, in the Church, in grace, in sacraments, in prayer, in love, in charity to others! What unexplored regions lay beyond the small tract which she had explored!