utas!--Here, lictors! Bind him--away with him
to the Circus with the criminals thrown to the wild beasts! He allowed
the girl whose life I bade him spare to be burned to death before his
eyes, and the hapless sick were slain at his command by a beardless
boy!--And Tarautas! I valued him as I do all who are superior to their
kind; I cared for him. He was wounded for our entertainment, my friends.
Poor fellow--poor, brave Tarautas!"

He here broke into loud sobs, and it was so unheard-of, so
incomprehensible a thing that this man should weep who, even at his
father's death had not shed a tear, that Julius Paulinus himself held his
mocking tongue.

The rest of the spectators also kept anxious and uneasy silence while the
lictors bound Zminis's hands, and, in spite of his attempts to raise his
voice once more in self-defense, dragged him away and thrust him out
across the threshold of the dining-hall. The door closed behind him, and
no applause followed, though every one approved of the Egyptian's
condemnation, for Caracalla was still weeping.

Was it possible that these tears could be shed for sick people whom he
did not know, and for the coarse gladiator, the butcher of men and
beasts, who had had nothing to give Caesar but a few hours of excitement
at the intoxicating performances in the arena? So it must be; for from
time to time Caracalla moaned softly, "Those unhappy sick!" or "Poor
Tarautas!"

And, indeed, at this moment Caracalla himself could not have said whom he
was lamenting. He had in the Circus staked his life on that of Tarautas,
and when he shed tears over his memory it was certainly less for the
gladiator's sake than over the approaching end of his own existence, to
which he looked forward in consequence of Tarautas's death. But he had
often been near the gates of Hades in the battle-field with calm
indifference; and now, while he thus bewailed the sick and Tarautas with
bitter lamentations, in his mind he saw no sick-bed, nor, indeed, the
stunted form of the braggart hero of the arena, but the slender, graceful
figure of a sweet girl, and a blackened, charred arm on which glittered a
golden armlet.

That woman! Treacherous, shameless, but how lovely and beloved! That
woman, under his eyes, as it were, was swept out of the land of the
living; and with her, with Melissa, the only girl for whom his heart had
ever throbbed faster, the miracle-worker who had possessed the unique
power of exorcising his to