first saw her.

"It was a hideous spot, the revolting prison-hall of Rhyakotis. She wore
only a threadbare robe that had once been costly, and a foul old woman
followed her about--as a greedy rat might pursue an imprisoned dove--and
loaded her with abusive language. She answered not a word, but large
heavy tears flowed slowly over her pale cheeks and down on to her hands,
which she kept crossed on her bosom. Grief and anguish spoke from her
eyes, but no vehement passion deformed the regularity of her features.
She knew how to endure even ignominy with grace, and what words the
raging old woman poured out upon her!

"I had long since been baptized, and all the prisons were open to me, the
rich Menander, the brother-in-law of the prefect--those prisons in which
under Maximin so many Christians were destined to be turned from the true
faith.

"But she did not belong to us. Her eye met mine, and I signed my
forehead with the cross, but she did not respond to the sacred sign. The
guards led away the old woman, and she drew back into a dark corner, sat
down, and covered her face with her hands. A wondrous sympathy for the
hapless woman had taken possession of my soul; I felt as if she belonged
to me, and I to her, and I believed in her, even when the turnkey had
told me in coarse language that she had lived with a Roman at the old
woman's, and had defrauded her of a large sum of money. The next day I
went again to the prison, for her sake and my own; there I found her
again in the same corner that she had shrunk into the day before; by her
stood her prison fare untouched, a jar of water and a piece of bread.

"As I went up to her, I saw how she broke a small bit off the thin cake