e--I may thank that fool of a woman that he became my
enemy--but he was older even than I, and she likes young men best. She is
like all the rest of them, and I of all men might have known it. It is
the way of the world: to-day one gives a blow and to-morrow takes one."

A sad smile passed over his lips, then his features settled into a stern
gravity, for various unwelcome images rose clearly before his mind, and
would not be got rid of.

His conscience stood in inverse relation to the vigor of his body. When
he was well, his too darkly stained past life troubled him little; but
when he was unmanned by weakness, he was incapable of fighting the
ghastly demon that forced upon his memory in painful vividness those very
deeds which he would most willingly have forgotten. In such hours he must
need remember his friend, his benefactor, and superior officer, the
Tribune Servianus, whose fair young wife he had tempted with a thousand
arts to forsake her husband and child, and fly with him into the wide
world; and at this moment a bewildering illusion made him fancy that he
was the Tribune Servianus, and yet at the same time himself. Every hour
of pain, and the whole bitter anguish that his betrayed benefactor had
suffered through his act when he had seduced Glycera, he himself now
seemed to realize, and at the same time the enemy that had betrayed him,
Servianus, was none other than himself, Phoebicius, the Gaul. He tried to
protect himself and meditated revenge against the seducer, and still he
could not altogether lose the sense of his own identity.

This whirl of mad imagining, which he vainly endeavored to make clear to
himself, threatened to distract his reason, and he groaned aloud; the
sound of his own voice brought him back to actuality.

He was Phoebicius again and not another, that he knew now, and yet he
could not completely bring himself to comprehend the situation. The image
of the lovely Glycera, who had followed him to Alexandria, and whom he
had there abandoned, when he had squandered his last piece of money and
her last costly jewels in the Greek city, no longer appeared to him
alone, but always side by side with his wife Sirona.

Glycera had been a melancholy sweetheart, who had wept much, and laughed
little after running away from her husband; he fancied he could hear her
speaking soft words of reproach, while Sirona defied him with loud
threats, and dared to nod and signal to the senator's son Polykarp.