“It will hold them back a moment,” muttered Demetrius, “but we must hasten.”

They ran across the peristylium, the pirate chief with his burden no less swift than Agias.  The door to the rear street was flung open, and they were out in a narrow alleyway.  Just as they did so, a howl of many voices proclaimed that the peristylium door had yielded.

“Guide me by the straightest way,” commanded the sea rover.

“Where?” was Agias’s question.

“To the wharves.  The yacht is the only safe place for the lady.  There I will teach her how I can honour a friend of Sextus Drusus.”

Agias felt that it was no time for expostulation.  A Vestal Virgin take refuge on a pirate ship!  But it was a matter of life and death now, and there was no time for forming another plan.  Once let the mob overtake them, and the lives of all three were not worth a sesterce.  Agias found it necessary to keep himself collected while he ran, or he would lose the way in the maze of streets.  The yacht was moored far below the Pons Sublicius, and the whole way was full of peril.  It was no use to turn off into alleys and by-paths; to do so at night meant to be involved in a labyrinth as deadly for them as that of the Cretan Minos.  The mob was on their heels, howling, raging.  The people were beginning to wake in their houses along the streets.  Men bawled “Stop thief!” from the windows, imagining there had been a robbery.  Once two or three figures actually swung out into the way before them, but at a stray glint of lantern light falling on Demetrius’s naked long sword, they vanished in the gloom.  But still the mob pressed on, ever gaining accessions, ever howling the more fiercely.  Agias realized that the weight of his burden was beginning to tell on even the iron frame of his cousin.  The pursuers and pursued were drawing closer together.  The mob was ever reenforced by relays; the handicap on Demetrius was too great.  They had passed down the Vicus Tuscus, flown past the dark shadow of the lower end of the Circus Maximus.  At the Porta Trigemina the unguarded portal had stood open; there was none to stop them.  They passed by the Pons Sublicius, and skirted the Aventine.  Stones and billets of wood began to whistle past their ears,—­the missiles of the on-rushing multitude.  At last the wharves!  Out in the darkness stood the huge bulk of a Spanish lumberman; but there was no refuge there.  The grain wharves and the oil wharves were passed; the sniff of the mackerel fisher, the faint odour from the great Alexandrian merchantman loaded with the spices of India, were come and gone.  A stone struck Agias in the shoulder, he felt numb in one arm, to drag his feet was a burden; the flight with the Caesarians to the Janiculum had not been like to this,—­death at the naked sword had been at least in store then, and now to be plucked in pieces by a mob!  Another stone brushed forward his hair and dashed, not against Demetrius ahead, but