ered if he had
escaped from a ravenous panther? The claws of a vengeful Caesar were
sharper far than those of any beast of the desert.

And now Taurus Antinor! the praefect of Rome! the man of silence and of
integrity! the idol of the people, the scorner of Caesar's godhead. Vague
rumour had reached Caligula of the praefect's strange sayings, his
refusal to enter the temples and to sacrifice to the gods. People said
that the Anglicanus worshipped one who claimed to be greater than Caesar
and all the deities of Rome.

Well, so be it! There he lay now in the dust, a huddled mass of man and
beast, the sand of the arena reddened with his blood. Caligula screamed
like the rest of his people, but his cry was:

"Habet! Habet! Habet!" And in a frenzy of rage and hate his thumb
pointed downwards, downwards, as if it were a dagger which he could
plunge into the Anglicanus' throat.

But the city guard were the first to break their bounds. Even whilst the
imperial madman exulted and shrieked forth his murderous "Habet!" they
had rushed to the rescue of their praefect.

The powerful grasp on the panther's throat was on the point of relaxing;
the brute was digging its claws in the shoulders of the fallen man, and
he, feeling faint with loss of blood, looked upon death as it stared
down at him from the beast's golden eyes, and all that he was conscious
of was the feeling that death was good.

When the city guard rushed to his rescue, and by dint of numbers and
strength of steel tore the ferocious creature from the body of its prey,
Taurus Antinor lay a while half conscious. He heard the cry of the
people round him, he felt a shower of sweet-scented petals fall upon him
from above, he heard the last dying roar of the panther and a scream of
rage from the imperial tribune.

Then the din became deafening: the trampling of feet, the rushing hither
and thither, the cries, the imprecations, and from beneath the tribunes
in their distant prisons, the roar of caged beasts like the far-off
rumbling of thunder.

Taurus Antinor raised himself on his knees. Both his shoulders had been
lacerated by the panther; he was bleeding from several wounds about the
legs and arms, and his whole body felt bruised and stiff.

But he struggled to his feet, and now, leaning against a large tree
trunk which had formed part of the setting of the scene, he tried to
take in every detail of what was going on around him. There was, of
course, a great dea