soft couch for his father by heaping up a high pile of fresh herbs.
They looked after the youth, who had taken his bow and arrows, as he
went up the mountain to hunt a wild goat; for Petrus had prescribed a
strengthening diet for the sick man. Not a word was spoken by either of
them till the hunter had disappeared. Then Stephanus said, "How much he
has altered since I have been ill. It is not so very long since I last
saw him by the broad light of day, and he seems meantime to have grown
from a boy into a man. How self-possessed his gait is."

Paulus, looking down at the ground, muttered some words of assent. He
remembered the discus-throwing and thought to himself, "The Palaestra
certainly sticks in his mind, and he has been bathing too; and yesterday,
when he came up from the oasis, he strode in like a young athlete."

That friendship only is indeed genuine when two friends, without speaking
a word to each other, can nevertheless find happiness in being together.
Stephanus and Paulus were silent, and yet a tacit intercourse subsisted
between them as they sat gazing towards the west, where the sun was near
its setting.

Far below them gleamed the narrow, dark blue-green streak of the Red Sea,
bounded by the bare mountains of the coast, which shone in a shimmer of
golden light. Close beside them rose the toothed crown of the great
mountain which, so soon as the day-star had sunk behind it, appeared
edged with a riband of glowing rubies. The flaming glow flooded the
western horizon, filmy veils of mist floated across the hilly coast-line,
the silver clouds against the pure sky changed their hue to the tender
blush of a newly opened rose, and the undulating shore floated in the
translucent violet of the amethyst. There not a breath of air was
stirring, not a sound broke the solemn stillness of the evening. Not