grievous ill, he is my uncle. You must
leave Pelusium this very night, and keep out of danger until
Pothinus's vexation can abate. In the morning I shall demand to see
the prisoners and to learn the eunuch's intentions touching them."

Agias accordingly fared away, much to Cornelia's regret; but not quite
so much to his own, because his enforced journeying would take him to
the Nile villa, where was the pretty Artemisia. Early on the following
day Cornelia boldly went to Pothinus, and, without any explanations,
demanded to see her uncle. The regent, who had tried to keep the
matter profoundly secret, first was irate, then equivocated, and tried
to deny that he had any Roman prisoners; then, driven to bay by
Cornelia's persistency and quiet inflexibility before his denials and
protests, gave her permission to be taken to the prison and see the
captives.

To pass from the palace of Pelusium to the fortress-prison was to
pass, by a few steps, from the Oriental life, in all its sensuous
splendour, to Orientalism in its most degraded savagery. The prison
was a half-underground kennel of stone and brick, on which the
parching sun beat pitilessly, and made the galleries and cells like so
many furnaces in heat. The fetid odour of human beings confined in the
most limited space in which life can be maintained; the rattle of
fetters; the grating of ponderous doors on slow-turning pivots; the
coarse oaths and brutish aspect of both jailers and prisoners; the
indescribable squalor, filth, misery,--these may not be enlarged upon.
The attendants led Cornelia to the cell, hardly better than the rest,
wherein Lentulus and Ahenobarbus were confined.

But another had been before Cornelia to visit the unfortunates. As the
lady drew toward the open door she saw the graceful, easy form of
Pratinas on the threshold, one hand carelessly thrust in the folds of
his himation, the other gesturing animatedly, while he leaned against
the stone casing.

Lucius Lentulus, his purple-lined tunic dirty and torn, his hair
disordered, his face knitted into a bitter frown, crouched on a stool
in the little low-ceiled room, confronting the Hellene. Cowering on a
mass of filthy straw, his head bowed, his body quaking in a paroxysm
of fear, was another whose name Cornelia knew full well.

Pratinas was evidently just concluding a series of remarks.

"And so, my friends, amici, as we say at Rome," he was jauntily
vapouring, "I regret indeed that the ato