st suspicion of the possibility of her
escape troubled his sense of security, when, not finding Sirona in the
sleeping-room, he went into the sitting-room to carry out the meditated
punishment. Here again--no one.

He paused in astonishment; but the thought that she could have fled
appeared to him so insane, that he immediately and decisively dismissed
it. No doubt she feared his wrath, and was hidden under her bed or behind
the curtain which covered his clothes. "The dog," thought he, "is still
cowering by her--" and he began to make a noise, half whistling and half
hissing, which Iambe could not bear, and which always provoked her to
bark angrily--but in vain. All was still in the vacant room, still as
death. He was now seriously anxious; at first deliberately, and then with
rapid haste, he threw the light under every vessel, into every corner,
behind every cloth, and rummaged in places that not even a child--nay
hardly a frightened bird could have availed itself of for concealment. At
last his right hand fairly dropped the ropes, and his left, in which he
held the lamp, began to tremble. He found the shutters of the
sleeping-room open; where Sirona had been sitting on the seat looking at
the moon, before Hermas had come upon the scene. "Then she is not here!"
he muttered, and setting the lamp on the little table, from which he had
just now flung Polykarp's glass, he tore open the door, and hurried into
the courtyard. That she could have swung herself out into the road, and
have set out in the night for the open desert, had not yet entered into
his mind. He shook the door that closed in the homestead, and found it
locked; the watch-dogs roused themselves, and gave tongue, when
Phoebicius turned to Petrus' house, and began to knock at the door with
the brazen knocker, at first softly and then with growing anger; he
considered it as certain that his wife had sought and found protection
under the senator's roof. He could have shouted with rage and anguish,
and yet he hardly thought of his wife and the danger of losing her, but
only of Polykarp and the disgrace he had wrought upon him, and the
reparation he would exact from him, and his parents, who had dared to
tamper with his household rights--his, the imperial centurion's.

What was Sirona to him? In the flush of an hour of excitement he had
linked her destiny to his.

At Arelas, about two years since, one of his comrades had joined their
circle of boon-companions, a