ing his foot violently, rejoined, perhaps to give
vent to his long-stifled passions:

'All the gold of Dalmatia,' cried he, 'will not buy thee a crust of
bread. Starve, wretch! thy dying groans will never wake even the echo of
these vast halls; nor will the air ever reveal, as thou gnawest, in thy
desperate famine, thy flesh from thy bones, that so perishes the man who
threatened, and could have undone, Arbaces! Farewell!'

'Oh, pity--mercy! Inhuman villain; was it for this...'

The rest of the sentence was lost to the ear of Arbaces as he passed
backward along the dim hall. A toad, plump and bloated, lay unmoving
before his path; the rays of the lamp fell upon its unshaped hideousness
and red upward eye. Arbaces turned aside that he might not harm it.

'Thou art loathsome and obscene,' he muttered, 'but thou canst not
injure me; therefore thou art safe in my path.'

The cries of Calenus, dulled and choked by the barrier that confined
him, yet faintly reached the ear of the Egyptian. He paused and
listened intently.

'This is unfortunate,' thought he; 'for I cannot sail till that voice is
dumb for ever. My stores and treasures lie, not in yon dungeon it is
true, but in the opposite wing. My slaves, as they move them, must not
hear his voice. But what fear of that? In three days, if he still
survive, his accents, by my father's beard, must be weak enough,
then!--no, they could not pierce even through his tomb. By Isis, it is
cold!--I long for a deep draught of the spiced Falernian.'

With that the remorseless Egyptian drew his gown closer round him, and
resought the upper air.

Chapter XIV

NYDIA ACCOSTS CALENUS.

WHAT words of terror, yet of hope, had Nydia overheard! The next day
Glaucus was to be condemned; yet there lived one who could save him, and
adjudge Arbaces to his doom, and that one breathed within a few steps of
her hiding-place! She caught his cries and shrieks--his
imprecations--his prayers, though they fell choked and muffled on her
ear. He was imprisoned, but she knew the secret of his cell: could she
but escape--could she but seek the praetor he might yet in time be given
to light, and preserve the Athenian. Her emotions almost stifled her;
her brain reeled--she felt her sense give way--but by a violent effort
she mastered herself,--and, after listening intently for several
minutes, till she was convinced that Arbaces had left the space to
solitude and herself, she crept on a