“What!” exclaimed, with strong excitement, the haughty lady, “without waiting even for that future ideal existence after death; already, even now, you presume to claim equality with me? Nay, who knows, perhaps superiority over me. Come, tell me at once, and without daring to equivocate or disguise, if you do so or not?” And she sat up in an attitude of eager expectation. At every word of the calm reply her agitation increased; and violent passions seemed to contend within her, as Syra said: “Most noble mistress, far superior are you to me in place, and power, and learning, and genius, and in all that enriches and embellishes life; and in every grace of form and lineament, and in every charm of act and speech, high are you raised above all rivalry, and far removed from envious thought, from one so lowly and so insignificant as I. But if I must answer simple truth to your authoritative question”--she paused, as faltering; but an imperious gesture from her mistress bade her continue--“then I put it to your own judgment, whether a poor slave, who holds an unquenchable consciousness of possessing within her a spiritual and living intelligence, whose measure of existence is immortality, whose only true place of dwelling is above the skies, whose only rightful prototype is the Deity, can hold herself inferior in moral dignity, or lower in greatness of thought, than one who, however gifted, owns that she claims no higher destiny, recognizes in herself no sublimer end, than what awaits the pretty irrational songsters that beat, without hope of liberty, against the gilded bars of that cage.”[20] Fabiola’s eyes flashed with fury; she felt herself, for the first time in her life, rebuked, humbled by a slave. She grasped the style in her right hand, and made an almost blind thrust at the unflinching handmaid. Syra instinctively put forward her arm to save her person, and received the point, which, aimed upwards from the couch, inflicted a deeper gash than she had ever before suffered. The tears started into her eyes through the smart of the wound, from which the blood gushed in a stream. Fabiola was in a moment ashamed of her cruel, though unintentional, act, and felt still more humbled before her servants. “Go, go,” she said to Syra, who was stanching the blood with her handkerchief, “go to Euphrosyne, and have the wound dressed. I did not mean to hurt you so grievously. But stay a moment, I must make you some compensation.” Then, after turning over her trinkets on the table, she continued, “Take this ring; and you need not return here again this evening.” Fabiola’s conscience was quite satisfied; she had made [Illustration: “He who watched with beaming eye, the alms-coffers of Jerusalem, and noted the widow’s mite, alone saw dropped into the chest, by the bandaged arm of a foreign female slave, a valuable emerald ring.”] [Illustration: A Lamp, found in the Catacombs.]