lying on a lion's skin flat on his
stomach, with his face in both his hands; a hanging lamp lit up his
armour, which was hooked on to the tent-pole above his head.

"You are suffering?" said the slave to him. "What is the matter with
you? Answer me?" And he shook him by the shoulder calling him several
times, "Master! master!"

At last Matho lifted large troubled eyes towards him.

"Listen!" he said in a low voice, and with a finger on his lips. "It is
the wrath of the Gods! Hamilcar's daughter pursues me! I am afraid of
her, Spendius!" He pressed himself close against his breast like a child
terrified by a phantom. "Speak to me! I am sick! I want to get well! I
have tried everything! But you, you perhaps know some stronger gods, or
some resistless invocation?"

"For what purpose?" asked Spendius.

Striking his head with both his fists, he replied:

"To rid me of her!"

Then speaking to himself with long pauses he said:

"I am no doubt the victim of some holocaust which she has promised to
the gods?--She holds me fast by a chain which people cannot see. If I
walk, it is she that is advancing; when I stop, she is resting! Her eyes
burn me, I hear her voice. She encompasses me, she penetrates me. It
seems to me that she has become my soul!

"And yet between us there are, as it were, the invisible billows of a
boundless ocean! She is far away and quite inaccessible! The splendour
of her beauty forms a cloud of light around her, and at times I think
that I have never seen her--that she does not exist--and that it is all
a dream!"

Matho wept thus in the darkness; the Barbarians were sleeping. Spendius,
as he looked at him, recalled the young men who once used to entreat
him with golden cases in their hands, when he led his herd of courtesans
through the towns; a feeling of pity moved him, and he said--

"Be strong, my master! Summon your will, and beseech the gods no more,
for they turn not aside at the cries of men! Weeping like a coward! And
you are not humiliated that a woman can cause you so much suffering?"

"Am I a child?" said Matho. "Do you think that I am moved by their faces
and songs? We kept them at Drepanum to sweep out our stables. I have
embraced them amid assaults, beneath falling ceilings, and while the
catapult was still vibrating!--But she, Spendius, she!--"

The slave interrupted him:

"If she were not Hanno's daughter--"

"No!" cried Matho. "She has nothing in common with the daughter