dark and threatening aspect.'

'What mean you?'

'Piso!--'

'Fronto, I have in that made known my will, and more than once. Why
again dispute it?'

'I know no will, great Caesar, that may rightly cross or surmount that of
the gods. They, to me, are supreme, not Aurelian.'

Aurelian moved from the priest, and paced the room.

'I see not, Fronto, with such plainness the will of Heaven in this.'

''Tis hard to see the divine will, when the human will and human
affections are so strong.'

'My aim is to please the gods in all things,' replied the Emperor.

'Love too, Aurelian, blinds the eye, and softening the heart toward our
fellow, hardens it toward the gods.' This he uttered with a strange
significancy.

'I think, Fronto, mine has been all too hard toward man, if it were
truly charged. At least, of late, the gods can have no ground of blame.'

'Rome,' replied the priest, 'is not slow to see and praise the zeal that
is now crowning her seven hills with a greater glory than ever yet has
rested on them. Let her see that her great son can finish what has been
so well begun.'

'Fronto, I say it, but I say it with some inward pain, that were it
plain the will of the gods were so--'

'Piso should die!' eagerly interrupted the priest.

'I will not say it yet, Fronto.'

'I see not why Aurelian should stagger at it. If the will of the gods
is in this whole enterprise; if they will that these hundreds and
thousands, these crowds of young and old, little children and tender
youth, should all perish, that posterity by such sacrifice now in the
beginning may be delivered from the curse that were else entailed upon
them, then who can doubt, to whom truth is the chief thing, that they
will, nay, and ordain in their sacred breasts, that he who is their
chief and head, about whom others cluster, from whose station and power
they daily draw fresh supplies of courage, should perish too; nay, that
he should be the first great offering, that so, the multitudes who stay
their weak faith on him, may, on his loss, turn again unharmed to their
ancient faith. That too, were the truest mercy.'

'There may be something in that, Fronto. Nevertheless, I do not yet see
so much to rest upon one life. If all the rest were dead, and but one
alive, and he Piso, I see not but the work were done.'

'A thousand were better left, Aurelian, than Piso and the lady Julia!
They are more in the ears and eyes of Rome than all the preachers of