something very wrong in the administration of the affairs
of this world. Nay, more! for the freedwoman, unconscious of her own
impiety, had triumphed in the end; her death--majestic and sublime in
its suddenness--had set the seal upon her malediction.

And Dea Flavia marvelled that the dead woman remained so calm, her eyes
so still, when--if indeed Jupiter had been aroused by the monstrous
sacrilege--she must now be facing the terrors of his judgments.

And Taurus Antinor watched her in silence whilst she stood thus,
unconscious of his gaze, a perfect picture of exquisite womanhood set in
a frame of marble temples and colonnades, a dome of turquoise above her
head, the palm leaves above her throwing a dense blue shadow on her
golden hair and the white tunic on her shoulders.

He had heard much of Dea Flavia--the daughter of Claudius Octavius and
now the ward of the Emperor Caligula--since his return from Syria a year
ago, and he had oft seen her gilded and rose-draped litter gliding along
the Sacra Via or the Via Appia, surrounded with its numberless retinue:
but he had never seen her so close as this, nor had he heard her speak.

She was a mere child and still under the tutelage of her despotic father
when he--Taurus Antinor--tired of the enervating influences of decadent
Rome, had obtained leave from the Emperor Tiberius to go to Syria as its
governor. The imperator was glad enough to let him go. Taurus Antinor,
named Anglicanus, was more popular with the army and the plebs than any
autocratic ruler could wish.

He went to Syria and remained there half a dozen years. The jealousy of
one emperor had sent him thither and 'twas the jealousy of another that
called him back to Rome. Syria had liked its governor over well, and
Caius Julius Caesar Caligula would not brook rivalry in the allegiance
owed to himself alone by his subjects--even by those who dwelt in the
remotest provinces of the Empire.

But on his return to Rome the powerful personality of Taurus Antinor
soon imposed itself upon the fierce and maniacal despot.
Caligula--though he must in reality have hated the Anglicanus as much
and more than he hated all men--gave grudging admiration to his
independence of spirit and to his fearless tongue. In the midst of an
entourage composed of lying sycophants and of treacherous minions, the
Caesar seemed to feel in the presence of the stranger a sense of security
and of trust. Some writers have averred that Caligula