be spurred on to
use all his cunning in a second trial. We must enmesh the conspirators
so completely that when their stab is parried, not merely will their
power to repeat it be gone, but they themselves will be in danger of
retribution. And for this, some one must be confederate to their final
plan."

"Agias," said Cornelia, quietly, "Quintus said that you would be a
faithful servant to him and to myself. I believe he was right. You
have asked a great thing of me, Agias. I would not do it unless I
believed that you were unlike other slaves. I might imagine that
Lucius Ahenobarbus had bribed you to tell me this story, in order that
I should put myself in his power. But I trust you. I will do anything
you say. For you Hellenes have wits as keen as sharp steel, and I know
that you will do all you may to repay your debt to Quintus."

Agias knelt down and kissed the robe of his mistress. "My lady," he
said gently, "it is no grievous thing to be a slave of such as you.
Believe me; I will not betray my trust. And now if you can let me
leave you, I will hurry to Praeneste, and for the present our minds may
be at rest. For old Mamercus will, I am sure, be able to take good
care of Master Drusus for yet awhile."

"Go, and the gods--if there be gods--go with you!" replied Cornelia.
Agias kissed her robe a second time, and was gone. His mistress stood
in the middle of the empty room. On the wall facing her was a painting
of "Aphrodite rising from the Foam," which Drusus had given her. The
sensuous smiles on the face of the goddess sickened Cornelia, as she
looked upon it. To her, at the moment, laughter was more hideous than
any sobbing. Outside the door she heard the gay, witless chatter of
the maids and the valets. They were happy--they--slaves, "speaking
tools,"--and she with the blood of the Claudii and Cornelii in her
veins, a patrician among patricians, the niece of a consul-elect, a
woman who was the heiress of statesmen and overturners of
kingdoms,--_she_ was miserable beyond endurance. Cornelia paced up and
down the room, wishing she might order the giggling maids to be
flogged and their laughter turned into howling. Then she summoned
Cassandra.

* * * * *

Cornelia had never before tried to play the actress, but that night
she flung herself into the game for life and death with all the
earnestness of an energetic, intelligent, and spontaneous woman. She
had been barely civil to Luc