“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.

Hadrian was startled and when he saw him lying motionless at his feet he bent over him—­less from pity than from a wish to see what was the matter with him; for he had also dabbled in medicine.  Just as he was lifting the fallen man’s hand to feel his pulse Arsinoe rushed into the room.  She had heard the last words of the antagonists with breathless anxiety and her father’s fall and now threw herself on her knees by the side of the unhappy man, just opposite to Hadrian, and as his distorted and grey-white face told her what had occurred she broke out in a passionate cry of anguish.  Her brothers and sisters followed at her heels, and when they saw their favorite sister bewailing herself they followed her example without knowing at first what Arsinoe was crying for, but soon with terror and horror at their father lying there stiff and disfigured.  The Emperor, who had never had either son or daughter of his own, found nothing so intolerable as the presence of crying children.  However he endured the wailing and whimpering that surrounded him till he had ascertained the condition of the man lying on the ground before him.