s of soldiers,
heroes, statesmen, who had borne it worthily and left it clean for their
sons and their sons' sons. I made it the name of wealth as well as of
greatness; I thought to hand it down to my sons and my sons' sons, as
the fires of Vesta are handed down from one generation to the next. A
son I prayed for--what any sodden carter is judged worthy to beget; a
male child to uprear in the traditions of his house, to add, an he
might, his share to the glory of it. A son to serve Rome as his fathers
served. And what was born to me? A puling fool, not worthy even to breed
her kind into the world. Were she blessed with wit, she might mate with
one worthy of her blood and keep her name thus from complete extinction.
As it is--what man would have her to bear him mindless brats? Who would
become sire to a race of idiots?"

Livinius scratched the wax of his tablet absently, and rubbed his finger
over the mark.

"I have wondered often why you never married again," he remarked,
tentatively. "It is fifteen years since Constantia's death; surely in
that time you might have found a woman to become the mother of your
sons."

"True, I might," Eudemius admitted, coolly. "But those fifteen years
ago, through mine own folly and hatred of life after that double blow of
her death and knowledge of the girl's condition,--for it was a blow,
Livinius, since I was not then the wooden image of to-day,--there fell
on me the judgment of the gods for such rebellion as mine." He turned
his sombre eyes full on Livinius. "Would you believe, to see me as I sit
here, that mine is a body racked by the tortures of the damned, drained
of the very sap of life by disease that eats into every nerve and leaves
it raw and quivering, yet that only numbs when its fury is spent, and
will not kill? That time after time, when its throes are on me, I have
turned craven and begged Claudius for a potion to end it all?" He
laughed shortly, with no sound of merriment. "I marry again--a rotten
hulk fit only for carrion!"

Livinius listened, shocked.

"Oh, my dear!" he exclaimed in honest sympathy, "is it indeed thus with
thee? And I had thought of thee entering the harbor of thy rest,
wealthy, honored, reconciled, perhaps, to what the gods in their wisdom
had ordained for thee, to end thy days in quiet and content. For fifteen
years, thou sayest. Man, how hast thou lived to tell it?"

Eudemius smiled, a smile which began at his lips and ended there,
leaving hi