er?' asked Marcian.

'Are your senses more delicate than mine?'

'It seems so. I could wish I had chosen another hour for visiting you.'

'It was well chosen,' said Heliodora, regarding him fixedly. 'This
slave I have chastised, shall I tell you of what he was guilty? He has
a blabbing tongue.'

'I see not how that concerns me,' was his cold reply, as he met her
look with steady indifference.

From her lounging attitude Heliodora changed suddenly to one in which,
whilst seated, she bent forward as though about to spring at him.

'How comes it that Bessas knows every word that has passed between us?'
broke fiercely from her lips.

In an instant Marcian commanded himself, shrugged his shoulders, and
laughed.

'That is a question,' he said, 'to put to your astrologer, your
oneirocritic, your genethliac. I profess not to read mysteries.'

'Liar!' she shot out. 'How could he have had it but from your own lips?'

Marcian betook himself to his utmost dissimulation, and the talk of the
next few minutes--on his part, deliberately provocative; on hers,
recklessly vehement--instructed him in much that he had desired to
learn. It was made clear to him that a long combat of wills and desires
had been in progress between the crafty courtesan and the half wily and
the half brutal soldier, with a baffling of Heliodora's devices which
would never have come to his knowledge but for this outbreak of rage.
How far the woman had gone in her lures, whether she had played her
last stake, he could not even now determine; but he suspected that only
such supreme defeat could account for the fury in which he beheld her.
Bessas, having (as was evident) heard the secret from Pelagius, might
perchance have played the part of a lover vanquished by his passions,
and then, after winning his end by pretence of treachery to the
Emperor, had broken into scoffing revelation. That were a triumph after
the Thracian's heart. Having read thus far in the past, Marcian had to
turn anxious thought upon the future, for his position of seeming
security could not long continue. He bent himself to allay the wrath he
had excited. Falling of a sudden into a show of profound distress, he
kept silence for a little, then murmured bitterly:

'I see what has happened. When the fever was upon me, my mind wandered,
and I talked.'

So convincing was the face, the tone, so plausible the explanation,
that Heliodora drew slowly back, her fury all but quenched. She