“True,” and Demetrius stared down into the inky water.  “It will not give back those who are gone forever.  Achilles could ask Hephaestus for his armour, but he could not put breath into the body of Patroclus. Plutus and Cratus[162] are, after all, but weaklings. A! This is an unequal world!”

  [162] Riches and strength.

When Agias fell asleep that night, or rather that morning, on a hard seaman’s pallet, two names were stirring in his heart, names inextricably connected:  Cornelia, whom he had promised Quintus Drusus to save from Ahenobarbus’s clutches, and Artemisia.  In the morning the yacht, having run her sixteen miles to Ostia, stood out to sea, naught hindering.

* * * * *

It was two months later when Quintus Drusus reentered Rome, no more a fugitive, but a trusted staff officer of the lawfully appointed dictator Julius Caesar.  He had taken part in a desperate struggle around Corfinium, where his general had cut off and captured the army with which Domitius had aimed to check his advance.  Drusus had been severely wounded, and had not recovered in time to participate in the futile siege of Brundusium, when Caesar vainly strove to prevent Pompeius’s flight across the sea to Greece.  Soon as he was convalescent, the young officer had hurried away to Rome; and there he was met by a story concerning his aunt, whereof no rational explanation seemed possible.  And when, upon this mystery, was added a tale he received from Baiae, he marvelled, yet dreaded, the more.

Chapter XIX

The Hospitality of Demetrius

I

While grave senators were contending, tribunes haranguing, imperators girding on the sword, legions marching, cohorts clashing,—­while all this history was being made in the outside world, Cornelia, very desolate, very lonely, was enduring her imprisonment at Baiae.

If she had had manacles on her wrists and fetters on her feet, she would not have been the more a prisoner.  Lentulus Crus had determined, with the same grim tenacity of purpose which led him to plunge a world into war, that his niece should comply with his will and marry Lucius Ahenobarbus.  He sent down to Baiae, Phaon,—­the evil-eyed freedman of Ahenobarbus,—­and gave to that worthy full power to do anything he wished to break the will of his prospective patroness.  Cassandra had been taken away from Cornelia—­she could not learn so much as whether the woman had been scourged to death for arranging the interview with Drusus, or no.  Two ill-favoured slatternly Gallic maids, the scourings of the Puteoli slave-market, had been forced upon Cornelia as her attendants—­creatures who stood in abject fear of the whip of Phaon, and who obeyed his mandates to the letter.  Cornelia was never out of sight of some person whom she knew was devoted to Lentulus, or rather to Phaon and his