n the firelight. His
head was bare; his hair was black and curled; he had a naked sword in
his hand, short and broad, little more than a dagger. He stabbed at me,
but he tripped and fell. I held you with one hand, and with the other--"

His wife had sprung to her feet with writhing features.

"Marcus!" she cried. "My beautiful Marcus! Oh, you brute! you brute! you
brute!" There was a clatter of tea-cups as she fell forward senseless
upon the table.

They never talk about that strange isolated incident in their married
life. For an instant the curtain of the past had swung aside, and some
strange glimpse of a forgotten life had come to them. But it closed
down, never to open again. They live their narrow round--he in his shop,
she in her household--and yet new and wider horizons have vaguely formed
themselves around them since that summer evening by the crumbling Roman
fort.

AN ICONOCLAST.

It was daybreak of a March morning in the year of Christ 92. Outside
the long Semita Alta was already thronged with people, with buyers and
sellers, callers and strollers, for the Romans were so early-rising a
people that many a Patrician preferred to see his clients at six in the
morning. Such was the good republican tradition, still upheld by the
more conservative; but with more modern habits of luxury, a night of
pleasure and banqueting was no uncommon thing. Thus one, who had learned
the new and yet adhered to the old, might find his hours overlap, and
without so much as a pretence of sleep come straight from his night of
debauch into his day of business, turning with heavy wits and an aching
head to that round of formal duties which consumed the life of a Roman
gentleman.

So it was with Emilius Flaccus that March morning. He and his fellow
senator, Caius Balbus, had passed the night in one of those gloomy
drinking bouts to which the Emperor Domitian summoned his chosen friends
at the high palace on the Palatine. Now, having reached the portals of
the house of Flaccus, they stood together under the pomegranate-fringed
portico which fronted the peristyle and, confident in each other's tried
discretion, made up by the freedom of their criticism for their long
self-suppression of that melancholy feast.

"If he would but feed his guests," said Balbus, a little red-faced,
choleric nobleman with yellow-shot angry eyes. "What had we? Upon my
life, I have forgotten. Plovers' eggs, a mess of fish, some bird or
other, and