lding himself erect and
composed, he walked backwards out of the room.

The silken curtains weighted with gold fell together with a swishing
sound behind him. And even as they did so a loud and prolonged roar of
laughter, like that of a hundred demons let loose, echoed throughout the
length and breadth of marble halls. Caius Nepos took to his heels and
fled like one possessed, with hands pressed to his ears, trying to shut
out the awful sounds that pursued him all down the corridors: the
shrieks of pain, the whizzing of whipcord through the air, and, rising
above all these, that awful laugh which must have found its origin in
hell.

CHAPTER XIII

"Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?"--ST. JOHN I. 46.

Dea Flavia was standing beside a tall stool, on the top of which--on a
level with her hands--was a shapeless mass of clay. Her fingers buried
themselves in the soft substance or ran along the surface, as the
exigencies of her task demanded.

Now and then she paused in her work, drew back a step or two from the
stool, and with head bent on one side surveyed her work with an anxious
frown.

Some few paces from her, at the further end of the room, a young girl
sat on an elevated platform, with shoulders bare and head straight and
rigid, the model for the proposed statue. Dea Flavia, in a simple
garment of soft white stuff falling straight from her shoulders, looked
peculiarly young and girlish at this moment, when she was free from all
the pomp and paraphernalia of attendants that usually surrounded her
wherever she went.

The room in which she indulged her artistic fancy was large and bare,
with stuccoed walls on which she herself had thrown quaint and fantastic
pictures of goddesses and of beasts, and groups of charioteers and
gladiators, drawn with a skilful hand. The room derived its light solely
from above, where, through a wide opening in the ceiling, came a peep of
cloud-covered sky. There was little or no furniture about, and the floor
of iridescent mosaic was innocent of carpet. Only in the corners
against the wall stood tall pots of earthenware filled with flowers,
with a profusion of late summer lilies and roses and with great branches
of leaves on which the coming autumn had already planted its first kiss
that turns green to gold.

"Hold thy head up, girl, a little higher," said Dea Flavia impatiently;
"thou sittest there like a hideous misshapen bunch of nothing-at-all.
Dost think I'