“And you have never given me a kiss,” Lucius had said one morning, when he was taking leave of Cornelia in the atrium of the Lentuli.  “Will you ever play the siren, and lure me to you? and then devour, as it were, your victim, not with your lips, but with your eyes?”

“Eho! Not so bold!” replied Cornelia, drawing back.  “How can I give you what you wish, unless I am safe from that awful Polyphemus up in Praeneste?”

When Ahenobarbus went away, his thoughts were to the following effect:  “I had always thought Cornelia different from most women; but now I can see that, like them all, she hates and hates.  To say to her, ‘Drusus is dead,’ will be a more grateful present than the largest diamond Lucullus brought from the East, from the treasure of King Tigranes.”

And it was in such a frame of mind that he met Pratinas by appointment at a low tavern on the Vicus Tuscus.  The Greek was, as ever, smiling and plausible.

“Congratulations!” was his greeting.  “Dumnorix has already started.  He has my orders; and now I must borrow your excellent freedman, Phaon, to go to Praeneste and spy out, for the last time, the land, and general our army.  Let him start early to-morrow morning.  The time is ample, and unless some malevolent demon hinder us, there will be no failure.  I have had a watch kept over the Drusus estate.  An old sentry of a steward, Mamercus,—­so I learn,—­has been afraid, evidently, of some foul play on the part of the consul-designate, and has stationed a few armed freedmen on guard.  Drusus himself keeps very carefully on his own premises.  This is all the better for us.  Dumnorix will dispose of the freedmen in a hurry, and our man will be in waiting there just for the gladiators.  Phaon will visit him—­cook up some errand, and inveigle him, if possible, well out in the colonnade in front of the house, before Dumnorix and his band pass by.  Then there will be that very deplorable scuffle, and its sad, sad results.  Alas, poor Drusus!  Another noble Livian gathered to his fathers!”

“I don’t feel very merry about it,” ventured Lucius.  “I don’t need Drusus’s money as much as I did.  If it wasn’t for Cornelia, I would drop it all, even now.  Sometimes I feel there are avenging Furies—­Dirae, we Latins call them—­haunting me.”

Pratinas laughed incredulously.  “Surely, my dear fellow,” he began, “you don’t need to have the old superstitions explained away again, do you?”

“No, no,” was his answer; Lucius capitulating another time.

So it came to pass that Pratinas had an interview with Phaon, Lucius’s freedman, a sleek, well-oiled Sicilian Greek, who wore his hair very long to cover the holes bored in his ears—­the mark of old-time servitude.  He was the darling of waiting-maids; the collector of all current scandal; the master spirit in arranging dinners, able to tell a Tuscan from a Lucanian boar by mere taste.  He used also to help