oment voiceless in wrath. Then he threw up an
arm, and spoke with terrible vehemence.

'Woman, if you have lied to me, wickedly seeking to put enmity between
me and my friend, may the pest smite you, and may you perish unforgiven
of man and God!'

Petronilla blanched not. For one instant he glared at her, and was gone.

CHAPTER XII

HELIODORA

Marcian's abode was in the Via Lata, the thoroughfare which ran
straight and broad, directly northwards, from the Capitoline Hill to
the Flaminian Gate. Hard by were the headquarters of the city watch, a
vast building, now tenanted by a few functionaries whose authority had
fallen into contempt; and that long colonnade of Hadrian, called the
Septa, where merchants once exposed their jewels and fabrics to the
crowd of sauntering wealthy, and where nowadays a few vendors of slaves
did their business amid the crumbling columns. Surrounded by these
monuments of antiquity, the few private residences still inhabited had
a dreary, if not a mean, aspect. Some of them--and Marcian's dwelling
was one--had been built in latter times with material taken from temple
or portico or palace in ruins; thus they combined richness of detail
with insignificant or clumsy architecture. An earthquake of a few years
ago, followed by a great inundation of the Tiber, had wrought disaster
among these modern structures. A pillar of Marcian's porch, broken into
three pieces, had ever since been lying before the house, and a marble
frieze, superb carving of the Antonine age, which ran across the
facade, showed gaps where pieces had been shattered away.

His family, active in public services under Theodoric, had suffered
great losses in the early years of the war; and Marcian, who, as a very
young man, held a post under the Praetorian Prefect at Ravenna, found
himself reduced to narrow circumstances. After the fall of Ravenna, he
came to Rome (accompanied on the journey by Basil, with whom his
intimacy then began), and ere long, necessity driving him to expedients
for which he had no natural inclination, he entered upon that life of
double treachery which he had avowed to his friend. As the world went,
Marcian was an honest man: he kept before him an ideal of personal
rectitude; he believed himself, and hitherto with reason, incapable of
falsity to those who trusted him in the relations of private life.
Moreover, he had a sense of religion, which at times, taking the form
of an overpowering sense