at Psyche
was amorous of his eyes.

Meanwhile he was a nobody, a young gentleman merely, who might have
moved in the best society, and who preferred the worst--his own. The
sudden elevation of Vespasian preoccupied him, and while he knew that
in the natural course of events his father would move to Olympus, yet
there was his brother Titus, on whose broad shoulders the mantle of
purple would fall. If the seditious Jews only knew their business! But
no. Forty years before a white apparition on the way to Golgotha had
cried to a handful of women, "The days are coming in which they shall
say to the mountains, 'Fall on us'; to the hills, 'Cover us.'" And the
days had come. A million of them had been butchered. From the country
they had fled to the city; from Acra they had climbed to Zion. When the
city burst into flames their blood put it out. Decidedly they did not
know their business. Titus, instead of being stabbed before Jerusalem's
walls, was marching in triumph to Rome.

The procession that presently entered the gates was a stream of
splendor; crowns of rubies and gold; garments that glistened with gems;
gods on their sacred pedestals; prisoners; curious beasts; Jerusalem in
miniature; pictures of war; booty from the Temple, the veil, the
candelabra, the cups of gold and the Book of the Law. To the rear
rumbled the triumphal car, in which laurelled and mantled Titus stood,
Vespasian at his side; while, in the distance, on horseback, came
Domitian--a supernumerary, ignored by the crowd.

When the prisoners disappeared in the Tullianum and a herald shouted,
"They have lived!" Domitian returned to the palace and hunted morosely
for flies. The excesses of the festival in which Rome was swooning then
had no delights for him. Presently the moon would rise, and then on the
deserted terrace perhaps he would bathe a little in her light, and
dream again of Pallas and of the possibilities of an emperor's sway,
but meanwhile those blue troubled eyes that Psyche was amorous of were
filled with envy and with hate. It was not that he begrudged Titus the
triumph. The man who had disposed of a million Jews deserved not one
triumph, but ten. It was the purple that haunted him.

Domitian was then in the early twenties. The Temple of Peace was
ascending; the Temple of Janus was closed; the empire was at rest. Side
by side with Vespasian, Titus ruled. From the Euphrates came the rumor
of some vague revolt. Domitian thought he would lik