a praetorian to bring such prisoners before great Caesar.

Caracalla bent a searching gaze upon the soldier; for he thought he
recognized in him the man who had aroused his envy and whose happiness
he had once greatly desired to damp, when against orders he had received
his wife and child in the camp. Recollections rose in his mind that
drove the hot blood to his cheek, and he cried, disdainfully:

"I might have guessed it! What can be expected beyond the letter of
their service from one who so neglects his duties? Did you not disport
yourself with lewd women in the camp before my very eyes, setting at
naught the well-known rules? Hands off the prisoner! This is your
last day as praetorian and in Alexandria. As soon as the harbor is
opened--to-morrow, I expect--you go on board the ship that carries
reinforcements to Edessa. A winter on the Pontus will cool your
lascivious blood."

This attack was so rapid and so unexpected to the somewhat dull-witted
centurion, that he failed at first to grasp its full significance. He
only understood that he was to be banished again from the loved ones
he had so long been deprived of. But when he recovered sufficiently to
excuse himself by declaring that it was his own wife and children who
had visited him, Caesar cut him short by commanding him to report his
change of service at once to the tribune of the legion.

The centurion bowed in silence and obeyed. Caracalla then went up to the
prisoner, and dragging him, weakly resisting, from the dark back ground
of the room to the window, he asked with a sneer:

"And what are assassins like in Alexandria? Ah, ha! this is not the face
of a hired cut-throat! Only thus do they look whose sharp wit I will
answer with still sharper steel."

"For that answer at least you are not wont to be at a loss," came
contemptuously from the lips of the prisoner.

The emperor winced as if he had been struck, and then exclaimed

"You may thank your bound hands that I do not instantly return you the
answer you seem to expect of me."

Then turning to his courtiers, he asked if any of them could give him
information as to the name and history of the assassin; but no one
appeared to know him. Even Timotheus, the priest of Serapis, who as head
of the Museum had so often delighted in the piercing intellect of this
youth, and had prophesied a great future for him, was silent, and looked
at him with troubled gaze.

It was the prisoner himself who satisfied