It was a sorry enough sight that met them—­though not uncommon in the age and place.  Some wretched slave-boy, a slight, delicate fellow, had been bound to the bars of a furca, and was being driven by two brutal executioners to the place of doom outside the gates.  At the street-crossing he had sunk down, and all the blows of the driver’s scourge could not compel him to arise.  He lay in the dust, writhing and moaning, with the great welts showing on his bare back, where the brass knots of the lash had stripped away the cloth.

“Release this boy!  Cease to beat him!” cried Fabia, with a commanding mien, that made the crowd shrink further back; while the two executioners looked stupid and sheepish, but did nothing.

“Release this boy!” commanded the Vestal.  “Dare you hesitate?  Do you wish to undo yourselves by defying me?”

“Mercy, august lady,” cried Alfidius,—­for the chief executioner was he,—­with a supplicatory gesture.  “If our mistress knows that her commands are unexecuted, it is we, who are but slaves, that must suffer!”

“Who is your mistress?” demanded Fabia.

“Valeria, wife of Lucius Calatinus.”

“Livia’s precious mother!” whispered Drusus.  “I can imagine her doing a thing like this.”  Then aloud, “What has the boy done?”

“He dropped a murrhine vase,” was the answer.

“And so he must be beaten to death!” exclaimed the young man, who, despite the general theory that most slaves were on a par with cattle, had much of the milk of human kindness in his nature. “Phui! What brutality!  You must insist on your rights, aunt.  Make them let him go.”

Sulkily enough the executioners unbound the heavy furca.  Agias staggered to his feet, too dazed really to know what deliverance had befallen him.

“Why don’t you thank the Vestal?” said Alfidius.  “She has made us release you—­you ungrateful dog!”

“Released?  Saved?” gasped Agias, and he reeled as though his head were in a whirl.  Then, as if recollecting his faculties, he fell down at Fabia’s feet, and kissed the hem of her robe.

“The gods save us all now,” muttered Alfidius.  “Valeria will swear that we schemed to have the boy released.  We shall never dare to face her again!”

“Oh! do not send me back to that cruel woman!” moaned Agias.  “Better die now, than go back to her and incur her anger again!  Kill me, but do not send me back!”

And he broke down again in inward agony.

Drusus had been surveying the boy, and saw that though he was now in a pitiable enough state, he had been good-looking; and that though his back had been cruelly marred, his face had not been cut with the lashes.  Perhaps the very fact that Agias had been the victim of Valeria, and the high contempt in which the young Drusian held his divorced stepmother, made him instinctively take the outraged boy’s part.

“See here,” began Drusus, “were you to be whipped by orders of Calatinus?”