Cornelia’s lips twitched; her hands pressed on her cheeks till the pale skin flushed red.  In her heart a hundred conflicting emotions held sway.  She said nothing for a long time, and then it was only to ask where the prisoners were confined.

“They are in the dungeon of the fortress,” said Agias.  “That is all that I can discover.”

“I must see them at once,” declared the lady.

“I do not know how Pothinus will take this,” replied the young freedman; “the discovery of his secret will be rightly attributed to me, and your ladyship would not care to imperil my life unless something very great is to be gained thereby.”

“I shall miss you very much,” said Cornelia, soberly.  “But though Lucius Lentulus has done me grievous ill, he is my uncle.  You must leave Pelusium this very night, and keep out of danger until Pothinus’s vexation can abate.  In the morning I shall demand to see the prisoners and to learn the eunuch’s intentions touching them.”

Agias accordingly fared away, much to Cornelia’s regret; but not quite so much to his own, because his enforced journeying would take him to the Nile villa, where was the pretty Artemisia.  Early on the following day Cornelia boldly went to Pothinus, and, without any explanations, demanded to see her uncle.  The regent, who had tried to keep the matter profoundly secret, first was irate, then equivocated, and tried to deny that he had any Roman prisoners; then, driven to bay by Cornelia’s persistency and quiet inflexibility before his denials and protests, gave her permission to be taken to the prison and see the captives.

To pass from the palace of Pelusium to the fortress-prison was to pass, by a few steps, from the Oriental life, in all its sensuous splendour, to Orientalism in its most degraded savagery.  The prison was a half-underground kennel of stone and brick, on which the parching sun beat pitilessly, and made the galleries and cells like so many furnaces in heat.  The fetid odour of human beings confined in the most limited space in which life can be maintained; the rattle of fetters; the grating of ponderous doors on slow-turning pivots; the coarse oaths and brutish aspect of both jailers and prisoners; the indescribable squalor, filth, misery,—­these may not be enlarged upon.  The attendants led Cornelia to the cell, hardly better than the rest, wherein Lentulus and Ahenobarbus were confined.

But another had been before Cornelia to visit the unfortunates.  As the lady drew toward the open door she saw the graceful, easy form of Pratinas on the threshold, one hand carelessly thrust in the folds of his himation, the other gesturing animatedly, while he leaned against the stone casing.

Lucius Lentulus, his purple-lined tunic dirty and torn, his hair disordered, his face knitted into a bitter frown, crouched on a stool in the little low-ceiled room, confronting the Hellene.  Cowering on a mass of filthy straw, his head bowed, his body quaking in a paroxysm of fear, was another whose name Cornelia knew full well.