of it?"

"Oh, yes," cried Melissa; "a striking rhythm in a song, or a line of
poetry--"

Caracalla nodded agreement, and went on more vehemently: "That is what
I experienced at the words, 'You have murdered your brother!' I not only
heard them now and then with my inward ear, but incessantly, like the
dreary hum of the flies in my camp-tent, for hours at a time, by day
and by night. No fanning could drive these away. The diabolical voice
whispered loudest when Geta had done anything to vex me; or if things
had been given him which I did not wish him to have. And how often that
happened! For I--I was only Bassianus to my mother; but her youngest was
her dear little Geta.

"So the years passed. We had, while still quite young, our own teams
in the circus. One day, when we were driving for a wager-we were still
boys, and I was ahead of the other lads--the horses of my chariot shied
to one side. I was thrown some distance on the course. Geta saw this. He
turned his horses to the right where I lay. He drove over his brother as
he would over straw and apple-parings in the dust; and his wheel
broke my thigh. Who knows what else it crushed in me? One thing is
certain--from that date the most painful of my sufferings originated.
And he, the mean scoundrel, had done it intentionally. He had sharp
eyes. He knew how to guide his steeds. He had never driven his wheel
over a hazel-nut in the sand of the arena against his will; and I was
lying some distance from the driving course."

Caesar's eyelids blinked spasmodically as he uttered this accusation,
and his very glance revealed the raging fire that was burning in his
soul. Melissa's sad cry of:

"What terrible suspicion!" he answered with a short, scornful laugh and
the furious assertion:

"Oh, there were friends enough who informed me what hope Geta had
founded on this act of treachery. The disappointment made him irritable
and listless, when Galenus had succeeded in curing me so far that I was
able to throw away my Crutch; and my limp--at least so they tell me--is
hardly perceptible."

"Not at all, most certainly not at all," Melissa sympathetically assured
him. He, however, went on:

"Yet what I endured meanwhile!--and while I passed so many long weeks of
pain and impatience on a couch, the words my mother had said about the
brother whom I murdered rang constantly in my ears as though a reciter
were engaged by day and night to reiterate them.

"But even this passed