For a time fortune favoured the Egyptian.  Glaucus, his strong frame still under the influence of the poison, was sentenced to encounter a lion in the amphitheatre, with no weapon beyond the incriminating stylus.  Nydia, in her terror, confessed to the Egyptian the exchange of the love philtre.  She he imprisoned in his own house.  Calenus, who had witnessed the deed, sought Arbaces with the intention of using his knowledge to his own profit.  He, by a stratagem, was incarcerated in one of the dungeons of the Egyptian’s dwelling.  The law gave Ione into the guardianship of Arbaces.  But, for a third time, Nydia was the means of frustrating the plans of Arbaces.

The blind girl, when vainly endeavouring to escape from the toils of the Egyptian, overheard, in his garden, the conversation of Arbaces and Calenus; and she heard the cries of Calenus from behind the door of the chamber in which he was imprisoned.  She herself was caught again by Arbaces’ servant, but she contrived to bribe her keeper to take a message to Glaucus’s friend, Sallust; and he, taking his servants to Arbaces’ house released the two captives, and reached the arena with them, to accuse Arbaces before the multitude at the very moment when the lion was being goaded to attack the Greek, and Arbaces’ victory seemed within his grasp.

Even now the nerve of the Egyptian did not desert him.  He met the charge with his accustomed coolness.  But the frenzied accusation of the priest of Isis turned the huge assembly against him.  With loud cries they rose from their seats and poured down toward the Egyptian.

Lifting his eyes at this terrible moment, Arbaces beheld a strange and awful apparition.  He beheld, and his craft restored his courage.  He stretched his hand on high; over his lofty brow and royal features there came an expression of unutterable solemnity and command.

“Behold,” he shouted, with a voice of thunder, which stilled the roar of the crowd, “behold how the gods protect the guiltless!  The fires of the avenging Orcus burst forth against the false witness of my accusers!”

The eyes of the crowd followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld, with ineffable dismay, a vast vapour shooting from the summit of Vesuvius in the form of a gigantic pine-tree; the trunk blackness, the branches fire—­a fire that shifted and wavered in its hues with every moment, now fiercely luminous, now of a dull and dying red, that again blazed terrifically forth with intolerable glare.  The earth shook.  The walls of the theatre trembled.  In the distance was heard the crash of falling roofs.  The cloud seemed to roll towards the assembly, casting forth from its bosom showers of ashes mixed with fragments of burning stone.  Then the burning mountain cast up columns of boiling water.

In the ghastly night thus rushing upon the realm of noon, all thought of justice and of Arbaces left the minds of the terrified people.  There ensued a mad flight for the sea.  Through the darkness Nydia guided Glaucus, now partly recovered from the effects of the poisoned draught, and Ione to the shore.  Her blindness rendered the scene familiar to her alone.