. They swung upon
their hinges and he passed out through them. And they fell to behind him
with a mighty clang.

Thunderous applause greeted him when he set his foot upon the sands of
the arena. The panther did not move. It had even ceased to snarl, but
its sinewy tail beat a dull tattoo upon the ground.

Then over the whole arena there rose a curious sound, like the sighing
of two hundred thousand souls, an indrawing of the breath in two hundred
thousand throats. Hortensius Martius looked up, for the sigh had
sounded very strangely in his ear, and it had been followed by a still
stranger silence, as if two hundred thousand hearts had momentarily
ceased to beat.

And as he looked he understood the sigh, and also the death-like silence
that followed.

He saw that from the niches all round the arena the safety ladders of
crimson silk had all been taken away.

And up in the imperial tribune the mighty Caesar laughed loudly and
long.

CHAPTER XXII

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life
for his friends."--ST. JOHN XV. 13.

No doubt that for that first tense moment all thought of treachery, of
the conspiracy, of the imperium and even of Dea Flavia, was absent from
the young man's mind.

It must have come upon him suddenly then and there that his life was now
in almost hopeless jeopardy. He was unarmed, and all around him the
smooth marble walls of the arena rose, polished and straight, to a
height of at least twelve feet, to the row of niches which alone might
afford him shelter. From the bases of the fluted columns the iron rings
to which the silken ladders had previously been attached, now hung at an
unattainable height: the narrow ledge--four feet from the ground--had
ceased to be a stepping-stone to safety.

All this, of course, came to him in a flash, as does to a dying man,
they say, the varied pictures of his life. Hortensius Martius, in that
one flash, realised that he was a doomed man, that he had been trapped
into this death-trap, and that nothing now but a miracle stood between
him and a hideous death.

Men up above in the tribunes held their breath; some women began to
whimper with excitement. But the man and the panther stood for a moment
eye to eye. No longer the hunted and the hunter, but the hungry beast of
the desert and his certain prey. The baffled creature, tantalised with
the blood of his other victims, was ready to satiate its lust at last.

There was