The seaman’s apple cheeks and gray beard curled in a smile. “My son, he sleeps under the steps of the Temple. Some rich merchant wife from the Roman Road spends the night, night after night, praying to Diana in the Temple. Diana does not give her what she asks; so then she comes out angry in the morning and asks the way to the Temple of your new God, and my son, he show her the way, and she throw him a handful of coin. I think, my master, she make mistake. All the rest was bronze. My son, he said she had a hard stiff face—you know its value, Master?” Onesimus had handed back the coin. He was hardly hearing the seaman’s words. He was thinking of the scene in the morning, when he had doubted the value of a child to the Kingdom; and now he knew that the beggar child with the maimed baby on its back had led Thecla’s mother to the door of the Kingdom, and he had clashed the door in her face because of past sin. “Know you its value, Master?” repeated the seaman. “Will it buy my freedom and my daughter’s, too? She is a slave girl in the Temples of Crete and is wasting of a consumption. I would take her back to a good woman in the hills off the Roman Road—a Grecian woman called Thecla. Know you her?” Onesimus came awake to pressing duties, like a dreamer out of selfish trance. “Yes, its value is three times the value of a slave; and I will now give you six times its value in Roman coin to countervail my sin of this very morning.” He had opened the leather wallet in his sash and was counting six coins out for the seaman’s one, when a thought arrested him. “Who mutilated the infant on your beggar-boy’s back? Is this girl child also yours?” “Nay, my Master,” the Greek seaman’s countenance saddened. “I sink not so low. The little child is daughter of the Roman guard at Patmos; but I am slave seaman for debt; and the witch, the fortune teller, at the Temple steps, who keeps my son and forces him to beg, she it was who maimed the infant. She feeds the children who are leased, and forces them to earn bread. The infant was only a female and will be knocked on the head; so the witch blinded her and broke her arm—” Gone were the Bishop’s dreams of a world of Light and Life and Love! Gone were his memories of Diana and her hunting horn winding divine music through the caves and grottoes of the Isles of Greece. He was down to earth with his feet on the ground, a warrior again for righteousness in a world of crime. What mattered the coward fear of Death? His duty as a soldier of His Lord was to fight for right in Life, and let Death take care of itself, as the nymph insect that morning had discarded its coat of skin to the winds. He added another coin to the six he was counting out to the seaman. “See you redeem the infant as well, and take them all to the hospice of the woman Thecla in the mountains,” he commanded. “I will stand bail for your good citizenship when you get your pass of freedom from the Roman Governor.”