The colloquy goes on; Valerianus, with all the ardour of his recent illumination upon him, trying to impart to his brother that which he learned but a few hours earlier. Cecilia has kept silence before the quick flow of question and answer, but at a given moment she intervenes, and, with the calm majesty that so singularly invests all her words and actions, says: “It is to me, dear Tiburtius, that you should put these questions. Valerianus is new in the Faith—I have known all its doctrines from my childhood.” And then comes that magnificent unfolding of the truths of Christianity which sounds more like the authoritative teaching of one of the Fathers of the Church than the profession of faith of a young girl. No point seems left in doubt; it is a luminous paraphrase of the Creed, adapted, with sublime tact and wisdom, to the requirements of the youth nurtured in merely pagan piety, surrounded with everything that could make this life attractive, and utterly unconscious of the immortality that was in him. That breaks on him as a new light, undreamt of before, but he does not yield at once like Valerianus. He cries out in revolt when told that in order to be purified he must take the same road, cast himself at the feet of a poor proscribed old man hiding underground among the tombs of despised victims. “But there is a price set on that old man’s head,” he urges, “and, if we are known to hold any intercourse with him, we shall be tortured and killed, and shall lose our lives here for a hope which may be vain, after all!” Cecilia had convinced him of the folly of worshipping idols made, as she said, “of stone and metal dug and fashioned by criminals”; but life, life as he knew it, was too sweet and real to be risked for anything less than the certainty of a better one. “Is it possible,” he breaks out, “that there can be another life after this one? Never have I heard of such a doctrine!”