recognized his sufferings, and when their eyes had met. Nothing now
escaped her keen glance which could add to her sympathy for the man she
had loathed but a minute before. She noticed a slight limp in his
gait and a convulsive twitching of his eyelids; his slender, almost
transparent hand, she reflected, was that of a sick man, and pain and
fever, no doubt, had thinned his hair, which had left many places bald.

And when the high--priest of Serapis and the augurs met him at the
bottom of the steps and Caesar's eye again put on the cruel scowl of
yesterday, she would not doubt that it was stern self-command which gave
him that threatening glare, to seem terrible, in spite of his anguish,
to those whose obedience he required. He had really needed his
companion's support as they descended the stair, that she could plainly
see; and she had observed, too, how carefully his guide had striven to
conceal the fact that he was upholding him; but the courtier was too
tall to achieve the task he had set himself. Now, she was much shorter
than Caesar, and she was strong, too. Her arm would have afforded him a
much better support.

But how could she think of such a thing?--she, the sister of Alexander,
the betrothed of Diodoros, whom she truly loved!

Caesar mingled with the priests, and her guide told her that the
corridor was now free. She peeped into the litter, and, seeing that
Diodoros still slept, she followed him, lost in thought, and giving
short and heedless answers to Andreas and the physicians She had not
listened to the priest's information, and scarcely turned her head to
look out, when a tall, thin man with a bullet-head and deeply wrinkled
brow was pointed out to her as Macrinus, the prefect of the body-guard,
the most powerful man in Rome next to Caesar; and then the "friends" of
Caracalla, whom she had seen yesterday, and the historian Dion Cassius,
with other senators and members of the imperial train.

Now, as they made their way through halls and passages where the foot of
the uninitiated rarely intruded, she looked about her with more interest
when the priest drew her attention to some particularly fine statue
or picture, or some symbolical presentment. Even now, however, though
association with her brothers had made her particularly alive to
everything that was beautiful or curious, she glanced round with less
interest than she otherwise might have done, for she had much else to
think of. In the first plac