Pollux, the sculptor. He shall be our guide and he will provide us with
wreaths and some mad disguise. I must see drunken men, I must laugh with
the jolliest before I am Caesar again. Make haste, my friend, or new
cares will come to spoil my holiday mood."

CHAPTER XXII.

Antinous and Mastor at once quitted the Emperor's room; in the corridor
the lad beckoned the slave to him and said in a low voice:

"You can hold your tongue I know, will you do me a favor?"

"Three sooner than one," replied the Sarmatian.

"You are free to-day--are you going into the city?"

"I think so."

"You are not known here, but that does not matter. Take these gold pieces
and in the flower-market buy with one of them the most beautiful bunch of
flowers you can find, with another you may make merry, and out of the
remainder spend a drachma in hiring an ass. The driver will conduct you
to the garden of Pudeus' widow where stands the house of dame Hannah; you
remember the name?"

"Dame Hannah and the widow of Pudeus."

"And at the little house, not the big one, leave the flowers for the sick
Selene."

"The daughter of the fat steward, who was attacked by our big dog?" asked
Mastor, curiously.

"She or another," said Antinous, impatiently, "and when they ask you who
sent the flowers, say 'the friend at Lochias,' nothing more. You
understand."

The slave nodded and said to himself: "What! you too-oh! these women."

Antinous signed to him to be silent, impressed on him in a few hasty
words that he was to be discreet and to pick out the very choicest
flowers, and then betook himself into the hall of the Muses to seek
Pollux. From him he had learnt where to find the suffering Selene, of
whom he could not help thinking incessantly and wherever he might be. He
did not find the sculptor in his screened-off nook; prompted by a wish to
speak to his mother, Pollux had gone down to the gatehouse where he was
now standing before her and frankly narrating, with many eager gestures
of his long arms, all that had occurred on the previous night. His story
flowed on like a song of triumph, and when he described how the holiday
procession had carried away Arsinoe and himself, the old woman jumped up
from her chair and clapping her fat little hands, she exclaimed:

"Ah! that is pleasure, that is happiness! I remember flying along with
your father in just the same way thirty years ago."

"And since thirty years," Pollux interposed. "I can stil