o need for that! Here I live in excellent company, the
work progresses, and--well, why should I deny it? There was something
specially to mark to-day; I met an old acquaintance again."

"An old one?"

"I have already known her sixteen years; but when I first saw her she
was in swaddling clothes."

"Then this venerable damsel friend is more than sixteen, perhaps
seventeen! Is Eros the friend of the happy, or does happiness only
follow in his train?" As the architect thoughtfully said these words to
himself, Pollux listened attentively to a noise outside, and said:

"Who can be passing out there at this hour? Do you not hear the bark of
a big dog mingle with the snapping of the three Graces?"

"It is Titianus conducting the architect from Rome," replied Pontius
excitedly.

"I will go to meet him. But one thing more my friend, you too have an
Alexandrian tongue. Beware of laughing at the Emperor's artistic efforts
in the presence of this Roman. I repeat it: the man who is now coming is
superior to us all, and there is nothing more repellant to me than when
a small man assumes a strutting air of importance because he fancies he
has discovered in some great man a weak spot where his own little body
happens to be sound. The artist I am expecting is a grand man, but
the Emperor Hadrian is a grander. Now retire behind your screens, and
tomorrow morning I will be your guest."

CHAPTER XI.

Pontius threw his pallium over the chiton he commonly wore at his work
and went forward to meet the sovereign of the world, whose arrival had
been announced to him in the prefect's letter. He was perfectly calm,
and if his heart beat a little faster than usual, it was only because
he was pleased once more to meet the wonderful man whose personality had
made a deep impression on him before.

In the happy consciousness of having done all that lay in his power
and of deserving no blame, he went through the ante-chambers and chief
entrance of the palace into the fore-court, where a crowd of slaves were
busied by torch-light in laying new marble slabs. Neither these workmen
nor their overseers had paid any heed to the barking of the dogs and the
loud talking which had for some little time been audible in the vicinity
of the gate-keeper's lodge; for a special rate of payment had been
promised to the laborers and their foremen if they should have finished
a set piece of the new pavement by a certain hour, to the satisfaction
of the a