o
nevertheless still displayed much youthful energy in the exercise of his
official duties. At night his drooping eyelids, that almost veiled his
eyes, opened more wildly, his flaccid hanging under-lip closed firmly,
his long neck and narrow elongated head were held erect, and when, at a
later hour, he went out to drinking-bouts or to the service in honor of
Mithras, he might often still be taken for a fine, indomitable young man.

But when he was drunk he was no longer gay, but wild, braggart, and
noisy. It frequently happened that before he left the carouse, while he
was still in the midst of his boon-companions, the syncope would come
upon him which had so often alarmed Sirona, and from which he could never
feel perfectly safe even when he was on duty at the head of his soldiers.

The vehement big man in such moments offered a terrible image of helpless
impotence; the paleness of death would overspread his features, his back
was as if it were broken, and he lost his control over every limb. His
eyes only continued to move, and now and then a shudder shook his frame.
His people said that when he was in this condition, the centurion's
ghastly demon had entered into him, and he himself believed in this evil
spirit, and dreaded it; nay, he had attempted to be released through
heathen spells, and even through Christian exorcisms. Now he sat in the
dark room on the sheepfell, which in scorn of his wife he had spread on a
hard wooden bench. His hands and feet turned cold, his eyes glowed, and
the power to move even a finger had wholly deserted him; only his lips
twitched, and his inward eye, looking back on the past with
preternaturally sharpened vision, saw, far away and beyond, the last
frightful hour.

"If," thought he, "after my mad run down to the oasis, which few younger
men could have vied with, I had given the reins to my fury instead of
restraining it, the demon would not have mastered me so easily. How that
devil Miriam's eyes flashed as she told me that a man was betraying me.
She certainly must have seen the wearer of the sheepskin, but I lost
sight of her before I reached the oasis; I fancy she turned and went up
the mountain. What indeed might not Sirona have done to her? That woman
snares all hearts with her eyes as a bird-catcher snares birds with his
flute. How the fine gentlemen ran after her in Rome! Did she dishonor me
there, I wonder? She dismissed the Legate Quintillus, who was so anxious
to please m