Antinous had already raised his hand to lift the handle, when the door was gently opened from outside, and the steward’s slave stood on the threshold.  The old negro presented a lamentable spectacle.  The Emperor’s dignified and awe-compelling figure, and his favorite’s rich garments made him feel embarrassed, and the hound’s threatening growl filled him with such terror that he huddled his lean negro-legs together, and, as far as its length would allow, tried to cover them for protection with his threadbare tunic.

Hadrian gazed in astonishment at this image of fear, and then asked: 

“Well! what do you want, fellow?”

The slave attempted to advance a step or two, but at a loud command from Hadrian he stood still, and as he looked down at his flat feet, he ruefully scratched his short-cropped grey hair, some of which had fallen off and left a bald patch.

“Well,” repeated Hadrian, in a tone which was anything rather than encouraging, as he relaxed his hold on the hound’s collar in a somewhat suspicious manner.  The slave’s bent knees began to quake, and holding out his broad palm to the grey-bearded gentleman, who seemed to him hardly less alarming than the dog, he began to stammer out in fearfully-mutilated Greek the speech which his master had repeated to him several times, and which set forth that he had come “into the presence of the architect, Claudius Venator, of Rome, to announce the visit of his master, a member of the town-council, a Macedonian, and a Roman citizen, Keraunus, the son of Ptolemy, steward of the once royal but now imperial palace at Lochias.”

Hadrian unrelentingly allowed the poor wretch to finish his speech, rubbing his hands with amusement, while the sweat of anguish stood on the old slave’s face, and to prolong the delightful joke, he took good care not to help the miserable old man when his unaccustomed tongue came to some insuperable difficulty.  When, at length, the negro had finished the pompous announcement, Hadrian said, kindly: 

“Tell your master he may come in.”

Scarcely had the slave left the room, when the sovereign, turning to his favorite, exclaimed: 

“This is a delicious joke!  What will the Jupiter be like, when the eagle is such a bird as this!”

Keraunus was not long to wait for.  While pacing up and down the passage outside the Emperor’s room, his bad humor had risen considerably, for he took it as a slight on the part of the architect, that he should allow him—­whose birth and dignities he would have learnt from his slave—­to wait several minutes, each of which seemed to him a quarter of an hour.  His expectation too, that the Roman would come to conduct him in person into his apartment was by no means fulfilled, for the slave’s message was briefly—­“He may come in.”

“Did he say may?  Did he not say “please to come in, or have the goodness to come in?” asked the steward.