Argathona said to the ancient, "Father, I have slept and dreamed and wakened, and I return to you to pray you to take me into your faith and to change me, immortal, into a mortal maid." The hermit bade her kneel before the table, and he knelt by her side and prayed awhile in a great agony of beseeching, after which he said certain sacred words to the girl for her to repeat to him; he then arose and blessed her and sprinkled holy-water upon her, and baptized her into the rites of Christ. When he had done Argathona was still Argathona in all her outward seeming, but from her mind all memory of her gift of immortality had vanished, and she thought of herself and of her life as a shepherd girl might think of herself, and of the eighteen years that she had laughed and danced through since her mother, that died in her childhood, had borne her to the sire that she had never seen. As for the old gods, there was no more memory of them in her mind than if no man had ever paid them praise in Greece, and the old speech of the gods was no longer upon her lips, but, instead, the speech of her mortal lover. All things else she remembered clearly: the finding of Simon and the coming of Rainouart to the wood, and the treason that took him from her and her journey to Athens to save him, with all that followed thereupon. All these things she remembered just as a girl of eighteen to whom they had happened would remember them, just in that way and no other way. For Argathona was now no more than a girl of eighteen years that had lived unwittingly without religion till she had met the holy man who had welcomed her into the faith of her fellow-mortals. But the thing that she remembered clearest and best of all things was that the lover she loved so dearly was waiting for her outside in the sunlight. Outside in the sunlight she found him, she walking with the hermit hand-in-hand. And outside in the sunlight the old pope blessed Rainouart and Argathona in wedlock, man and maid kneeling before the shrine. Then Simon brought horses and the three made their escape into Peloponnesus. THE END