sive, and as the young girl tossed with ever
increasing restlessness on the pillows, beads of moisture rose on her
forehead and matted the fair curls against her temples.

She felt too tired to get up, even though she vaguely marvelled how
wonderful must be the dawn, since its reflection was of such lurid
colour. She lay back drowsy and with nerves tingling; she closed her
eyes for they ached and burned intolerably.

Gradually to her half-aroused consciousness sounds too began to
penetrate. It seemed to her that the usual stately quietude of her house
was gravely disturbed this morning, shuffling footsteps could be heard
moving across the atrium, voices--scarce subdued--were whispering
audibly, and the shouts of the overseers echoed from across the
peristyle, and through it all a dull, monotonous sound, distant as yet
and faint, came at long intervals, the sound of Jove's thunder over the
Campania far away.

Dea Flavia listened more intently, and one by one through the veil which
kindly sleep had drawn over her memory, the events of the past day and
night knocked at the portals of her brain.

She remembered everything now, and with this sudden onrush of memory of
the past, came fuller consciousness of the present.

Through the hum of varied noises which filled her own house, she
distinguished presently more strange, more ominous sounds that came from
afar, like the thunders of Jove, and like them sounded weird and
threatening in her ear; hoarse cries and shouts which seemed like
peremptory commands, and groans that rose above the muffled din with
calls of terror and of pain.

In a moment Dea Flavia had put her feet to the ground. She ran to the
window, drew back the curtains and peered into the narrow street which,
at this point, separated her house from the rear of the Palace of
Tiberius.

A dull grey light enveloped the city in its mantle of gloom, and it was
not the torch of Phoebus which had spread the rosy gleam of dawn over
the sky! As Dea Flavia looked, she saw a canopy of dull crimson over her
head, and from beyond the Palace of Tiberius there rose at intervals
heavy banks of purple smoke.

Dea Flavia stood there for one moment at the window, paralysed with the
dread of what she saw and of what she guessed, and even as a cry of
horror died within her throat, Licinia, with grey hair flying loosely
round her pale face, and hands held out before her with an agonised
gesture of fear, came running into the