dreaded it; nay, he had attempted to be
released through heathen spells, and even through Christian exorcisms.
Now he sat in the dark room on the sheepfell, which in scorn of his wife
he had spread on a hard wooden bench. His hands and feet turned cold,
his eyes glowed, and the power to move even a finger had wholly deserted
him; only his lips twitched, and his inward eye, looking back on the
past with preternaturally sharpened vision, saw, far away and beyond,
the last frightful hour.

"If," thought he, "after my mad run down to the oasis, which few younger
men could have vied with, I had given the reins to my fury instead of
restraining it, the demon would not have mastered me so easily. How that
devil Miriam's eyes flashed as she told me that a man was betraying me.
She certainly must have seen the wearer of the sheepskin, but I lost
sight of her before I reached the oasis; I fancy she turned and went up
the mountain. What indeed might not Sirona have done to her? That woman
snares all hearts with her eyes as a bird-catcher snares birds with his
flute. How the fine gentlemen ran after her in Rome! Did she dishonor me
there, I wonder? She dismissed the Legate Quintillus, who was so
anxious to please me--I may thank that fool of a woman that he became my
enemy--but he was older even than I, and she likes young men best. She
is like all the rest of them, and I of all men might have known it. It
is the way of the world: to-day one gives a blow and to-morrow takes
one."

A sad smile passed over his lips, then his features settled into a stern
gravity, for various unwelcome images rose clearly before his mind, and
would not be got rid of.

His conscience stood in inverse relation to the vigor of his body. When
he was well, his too darkly stained past life troubled him little;
but when he was unmanned by weakness, he was incapable of fighting the
ghastly demon that forced upon his memory in painful vividness those
very deeds which he would most willingly have forgotten. In such hours
he must need remember his friend, his benefactor, and superior officer,
the Tribune Servianus, whose fair young wife he had tempted with a
thousand arts to forsake her husband and child, and fly with him into
the wide world; and at this moment a bewildering illusion made him fancy
that he was the Tribune Servianus, and yet at the same time himself.
Every hour of pain, and the whole bitter anguish that his betrayed
benefactor had suffered thr