“I would beg you,” he said, “to look at this masterpiece.”

The Emperor looked at the ground, but hardly had he begun to study the picture, of which he quite understood and appreciated the beauty, when just behind him he heard in a hoarse voice these words uttered with difficulty: 

“In Alexandria—­it is the custom, to greet—­to say something—­to the people you visit.”  Hadrian half turned his head towards the speaker and said indifferently but with strong and insulting contempt: 

“In Rome too it is the custom to greet honest people.”  Then looking down again at the mosaic he said, “Exquisite, exquisite an inestimable and precious work.”  At Hadrian’s words Keraunus’ eyes almost started out of his head.  His face was crimson and his lips pale; he went close up to him and as soon as he had found breath to speak he said: 

“What have you—­what are your words intended to convey?”

Hadrian turned suddenly and full upon the steward; in his eyes sparkled that annihilating fire which few could endure to gaze on and his deep voice rolled sullenly through the room as he said to the miserable man: 

“My words are intended to convey that you have been an unfaithful steward, that I know what you would rather I should not know, that I have learned how you deal with the property entrusted to you, that you—­”

“That I?”—­cried the steward trembling with rage and stepping close up to the Emperor.

“That you,” shouted Hadrian in his face, “tried to sell this picture to this man; in short that you are a simpleton and a scoundrel into the bargain.”

“I—­I,” gasped Keraunus slapping his hand on his fat chest.  “I—­a—­a—­ but you shall repent of these words.”

Hadrian laughed coldly and scornfully, but Keraunus sprang on Gabinius with a wonderful agility for his size, clutched him by the collar of his chiton and shook the feeble little man as if he were a sapling, shrieking meanwhile: 

“I will choke you with your own lies—­serpent, mean viper!”

“Madman!” cried Hadrian “leave hold of the Ligurian or by Sirius you shall repent it.”

“Repent it?” gasped the steward.  “It will be your turn to repent when Caesar comes.  Then will come a day of reckoning with false witnesses, shameless calumniators who disturb peaceful households, while credulous idiots—­”

“Man, man,” interrupted Hadrian, not loudly but sternly and ominously, “you know not to whom you speak.”

“Oh I know you—­I know you only too well.  But I—­I—­shall I tell you who I am?”

“You—­you are a blockhead,” replied the monarch shrugging his shoulders contemptuously.  Then he added calmly, with dignity—­almost with indifference: 

“I am Caesar.”

At these words the steward’s hand dropped from the chiton of the half-throttled dealer.  Speechless and with a glassy stare he gazed in Hadrian’s face for a few seconds.  Then he suddenly started, staggered backwards, uttered a loud choking, gurgling, nameless cry, and fell back on the floor like a mass of rock shaken from its foundations by an earthquake.  The room shook again with his fall.