s bitter eyes unlightened.

"Ay, fifteen years--and yet not so bad as that!" he said shortly. "Or it
would have been well over with me by now. But I have known from the
first what lay ahead. I won it from Claudius,--poor fool, how he
trembled to tell me!--knew that each attack must be more severe than the
one before; that each day the disease would stride forward a slow inch,
no more, and no human skill might advance it or hold it back." His harsh
voice sank a note lower. "At such times, when that grip closes upon me,
I know not what I do. Rather, I know, yet am powerless to act otherwise.
I tell thee, Livinius, I have had slaves flogged, ay, tortured, before
my eyes, to see if by chance I might find suffering greater than mine
own. And if they died, I have had tortured those who let them die, for
it is not death I want, but what I have found to be worse than death.
Judge then if I were not better out of the world! Yet the only way of
release open to me I will not take, since I have not yet lost courage
enough to brand myself a coward. I have told Claudius, on pain of death
for disobedience, that no matter how I cry to him for peace, he shall
pay no heed. Strange, is it not, that in this house the only happy thing
is the cause of all the sorrow that hath entered it? And yet--perhaps it
is not so strange. She is but the cause; on others fall the effects, ...
and in their wisdom the gods have ordered that only effects shall count
in their scheme of things."

He put a hand over Livinius's hand, held it a moment, and let it go. For
the first time he fell into the intimacy of the other's speech.

"Thank thee, old friend, for thy sympathy. It is not often that the gall
of my bitterness overflows, for I have learned the wisdom of the Stoic
at first hand. But I can claim scant sympathy here,--and would not if I
could,--where men call me the Torturer behind my back and cringe like
curs before my face. I am hard and cruel and calloused to the bone; yet
were I not thus, in the name of the high gods, what should I be? A thing
lower than man, who can be lower than the beasts; from which gods and
men--ay, and beasts themselves--would turn in loathing. Thou art my
childhood's friend; thy sympathy hath been sweet to me, and I've bared
my heart to thee. I have said: 'The world runs thus and so with me; were
it in my power, I'd have it otherhow. As it is, no good will come of its
discussion, so let there be an end to it, now and for all