Once she saw Arsinoe dressed out like a queen, followed by beggar children and pelted with bad words—­then she saw her on the rotunda below the balcony romping with Pollux, and in their bold sport they broke her mother’s bust.  At last she dreamed that she herself was playing—­as in the days of her childhood—­in the gate-keeper’s garden with the sculptor.  They were making cakes of sand together, and Arsinoe jumped on the cakes as soon as they were made, and trod them all into dust.

The pretty pale girl had for a long time ceased to know the refreshing, dreamless, sound sleep of youth, for the sweetest slumbers are more apt to seek out those who by day have some rest, than those who are worn out by fatigue, and evening after evening Selene was one of these.  Every night she had dreams, but tonight they were almost exclusively sad in character, and so terrifying that she woke herself repeatedly with her own groaning, or disturbed Arsinoe’s peaceful sleep by loud cries.

These cries did not disturb her father, he—­to-night, as every night—­had begun to snore soon after he had gone to rest, never to cease till it was time to rise again.

Selene was always busy in the house before any one, even before the slaves; and the approach of day this time seemed to the sleepless girl a real release.  When she rose it was still perfectly dark, but she knew that the rising of the December sun could not be long to wait for.

Without paying any heed to the sleepers, or making any special effort to tread noiselessly, or to do what she had to do without disturbing them, she lighted her little lamp, at the night-lamp, washed herself, arranged her hair, and then knocked at the doors of the old slaves.

As soon as they had yawned out “directly,” or a sleepy “very well,” she went into her father’s room and took his jug to fetch him fresh water in it.  The best well in the palace was on a small terrace on the west side; it was supplied by the city aqueducts, and was constructed of five marble monsters, bearing up on twisted fishtails a huge shell, in which sat a bearded river-god.  Their horse-shaped heads poured water into a vast basin, which, in the lapse of centuries, had grown full of a green and filmy vegetation.

In order to reach this fountain, Selene had to go along the corridor where lay the rooms occupied by the Emperor and his followers.  She only knew that an architect from Rome had taken up his quarters at Lochias, for, some time after midnight, she had been to get out meat and salt for him, but in what rooms the strangers had been lodged no one had told her.  But this morning as she followed the path she was accustomed to tread day by day at the same hour, she felt an anxious shiver.  She felt as if everything were not quite the same as usual, and just as she had set her foot on the cop step of the flight leading to the corridor, she raised her lamp to discover whence came the sound she thought she could hear, she perceived in the gloom a fearful something. which as she approached it resembled a dog, and which was larger—­much larger—­than a dog should be.