nted was the quick restoration of peace and order. The fraudulent
auctioneer was naught in his sight but a breaker of the law. As such he
was deserving of such punishment as the law decreed and no more. But his
howls just now were the means of rousing in the hearts of the crowd that
most despicable of all passions to which the Roman--the master of
civilisation--was a prey--the love of seeing some creature, man or
beast, in pain, a passion which brought the Roman citizen down to the
level of the brute: therefore Taurus Antinor wished above all to silence
Hun Rhavas.

"One more sound from thy throat and I'll have thee scourged now and
branded ere thy trial," he said.

The threat was sufficient. The negro, feeling that in submission lay his
chief hope of mercy on the morrow, allowed himself to be led away
quietly whilst the young patricians--cheated of an anticipated
pleasure--protested audibly.

"And thou, Cheiron," continued the praefect, addressing a fair-skinned
slave up on the rostrum who had been assistant hitherto in the auction,
"do thou take the place vacated by Hun Rhavas."

He gave a few quick words of command to the lictors.

"Take the hat from off that girl's head," he said, "and put the
inscribed tablet round her neck. Then she can be set up for sale as the
State hath decreed."

As if moved by clockwork one of the lictors approached the girl and
removed the unbecoming hat from her head, releasing a living stream of
gold which, as it rippled over the girl's shoulders, roused a quick cry
of admiration in the crowd.

In a moment Menecreta realised that her last hope must yield to the
inevitable now. Even whilst her accomplice, Hun Rhavas, received the
full brunt of the praefect's wrath she had scarcely dared to breathe,
scarcely felt that she lived in this agony of fear. Her child still
stood there on the platform, disfigured by the ugly headgear, obviously
most unattractive to the crowd; nor did the awful possibility at first
present itself to her mind that all her schemes for obtaining possession
of her daughter could come to naught. It was so awful, so impossible of
conception that the child should here, to-day, pass out of the mother's
life for ever and without hope of redemption; that she should become the
property of a total stranger who might for ever refuse to part from her
again--an agriculturist, mayhap, who lived far off in Ethuria or
Macedon--and that she, the mother, could never, never, hope