tand? I
have spoken his words many times. Now he shall speak mine."

Marcia could hardly fail to understand the nature of the power which
this man now proposed to lay at her feet; yet it all seemed horribly
impossible that he, a priest, could dare such sacrilege for such end.
Had she been Fabius, Paullus, or even Sergius,--men who were already
groping amid the Greek schools of doubt, and were coming to regard the
religion of the state more as an invaluable means of curbing the vices
of the low and ignorant than as a divine light for the learned,--had
she been such as these, this proposal of Iddilcar would have seemed
incredible only on account of its treason to his country. And yet, in
one sense, she was better fitted than they to understand the
Carthaginian. True scepticism had found little room under the mantle
of the gloomy, the terrible cult that swayed the destinies of the
Chanaanitish races. Even the priests, while they were ready enough to
use the people's faith to minister to their own ends, trembled before
their savage gods. Low, brutish, full of inconsistent wiles their
faith might be, but such faith it was as an educated Roman could with
difficulty comprehend. On the other hand, the minds of the women of
Rome had not as yet swerved from unquestioning belief in the gods
consulting and the gods apart, and the Torquati were most conservative
among all the great houses. From childhood up--and in years she was
scarcely more than a child--all these had been very real to her.
Pomona wandered through every orchard beside her beloved Vertumnus; Pan
and his sylvan brood sported behind the foliage of every copse. She
would as soon have thought of questioning their presence as of doubting
her own being. Marcia believed; the average Roman patrician affected
to believe and indulged in his polite, Hellenic doubts; the
Carthaginian priest, while he believed, with all Marcia's fervour, in a
theology to which Marcia's was tender as the divine fellowship of the
Phaeacians, yet conceived that it was entirely legitimate to play
tricks upon his fiend-gods--to pit his cunning against theirs. If they
caught him, perhaps they would laugh, perhaps consume him in the flames
of their wrath. It depended on their mood--whether they had dined
well, perhaps; and he would take his chances. He stood, now, toward
his deities, just where the heroes of Homer had stood centuries before.
He was a living evidence of the Asiatic birth o