them as he felt, he sent at once to old
Doris, desiring her not to retire to rest early that evening, since he,
the prefect, would be going late to Lochias.

"Tell her, too, as from yourself and not from me," Titianus instructed
the messenger, "that I may very likely look in upon her. She may light up
her little room and keep it in order."

No one at Lochias had the slightest suspicion of the honor which awaited
the old palace.

After Verus had quitted it with his wife and Balbilla, and when he had
again been at work for about an hour the sculptor Pollux came out of his
nook, stretching himself, and called out to Pontius, who was standing on
a scaffold:

"I must either rest or begin upon something new. One cures me of fatigue
as much as the other. Do you find it so?"

"Yes, just as you do," replied the architect, as he continued to direct
the work of the slave-masons, who were fixing a new Corinthian capital in
the place of an old one which had been broken.

"Do not disturb yourself," Pollux cried up to him. "I only request you to
tell my master Papias when he comes here with Gabinius, the dealer in
antiquities, that he will find me at the rotunda that you inspected with
me yesterday. I am going to put the head on to the Berenice; my
apprentice must long since have completed his preparations; but the
rascal came into the world with two left-hands, and as he squints with
one eye everything that is straight looks crooked to him, and--according
to the law of optics--the oblique looks straight. At any rate, he drove
the peg which is to support the new head askew into the neck, and as no
historian has recorded that Berenice ever had her neck on one side, like
the old color-grinder there, I must see to its being straight myself. In
about half an hour, as I calculate, the worthy Queen will no longer be
one of the headless women."

"Where did you get the new head?" asked Pontius. "From the secret
archives of my memory," replied Pollux. "Have you seen it?"

"Yes."

"And do you like it?"

"Very much."

"Then it is worthy to live," sang the sculptor, and, as he quitted the
hall, he waved his left-hand to the architect, and with his right-hand
stuck a pink, which he had picked in the morning, behind his ear.

At the rotunda his pupil had done his business better than his master
could have expected, but Pollux was by no means satisfied with his own
arrangements. His work, like several others standing on the same side