“What ails you to come here at this time of night?” asked Agellius; “who asked for your company?”

“I will come just when I please,” said the other, “and go when I please. I won’t give an account of my actions to any one, God or man, devil or priest, much less to you. What right have you to ask me?”

“Then,” said Agellius, “you’ll never get peace or comfort as long as you live, that I can tell you, let alone the life to come.”

Juba kept silent for awhile, and bit his nails with a smile on his face, and his eyes looking askance upon the ground. “I want no more than I have; I am well content,” he said.

“Contented with yourself,” retorted Agellius.

“Of course,” Juba replied; “whom ought one to wish rather to content?”

“I suppose, your Creator.”

“Creator,” answered Juba, tossing back his head with an air of superiority; “Creator;—that, I consider, is an assumption.”

“O, my dear brother,” cried Agellius, “don’t go on in that dreadful way!”

“ ‘Go on!’ who began? Is one man to lay down the law, and not the other too? Is it so generally received, this belief of a Creator? Who have brought in the belief? The Christians. ’Tis the Christians that began it. The world went on very well without it before their rise. And now, who began the dispute but you?”

“Well, if I did,” answered Agellius; “but I didn’t. You began in coming here; what in the world are you come for? by what right do you disturb me at this hour?”

There was no appearance of anger in Juba; he seemed as free from feeling of every kind, from what is called heart, as if he had been a stone. In answer to his brother’s question, he quietly said, “I have been down there,” pointing in the direction of the woods.

An expression of sharp anguish passed over his brother’s face, and for a moment he was silent. At length he said, “You don’t mean to say you have been down to poor mother?”

“I do,” said Juba.

There was again a silence for a little while; then Agellius renewed the conversation. “You have fallen off sadly, Juba, in the course of the last several years.”

Juba tossed his head, and crossed his legs.

“At one time I thought you would have been baptized,” his brother continued.

“That was my weakness,” answered Juba; “it was a weak moment: it was just after the old bishop’s death. He had been kind to me as a child; and he said some womanish words to me, and it was excusable in me.”

“Oh that you had yielded to your wish!” cried Agellius.