He paused in astonishment; but the thought that she could have fled appeared to him so insane, that he immediately and decisively dismissed it.  No doubt she feared his wrath, and was hidden under her bed or behind the curtain which covered his clothes.  “The dog,” thought he, “is still cowering by her—­” and he began to make a noise, half whistling and half hissing, which Iambe could not bear, and which always provoked her to bark angrily—­but in vain.  All was still in the vacant room, still as death.  He was now seriously anxious; at first deliberately, and then with rapid haste, he threw the light under every vessel, into every corner, behind every cloth, and rummaged in places that not even a child —­nay hardly a frightened bird could have availed itself of for concealment.  At last his right hand fairly dropped the ropes, and his left, in which he held the lamp, began to tremble.  He found the shutters of the sleeping-room open; where Sirona had been sitting on the seat looking at the moon, before Hermas had come upon the scene.  “Then she is not here!” he muttered, and setting the lamp on the little table, from which he had just now flung Polykarp’s glass, he tore open the door, and hurried into the courtyard.  That she could have swung herself out into the road, and have set out in the night for the open desert, had not yet entered into his mind.  He shook the door that closed in the homestead, and found it locked; the watch-dogs roused themselves, and gave tongue, when Phoebicius turned to Petrus’ house, and began to knock at the door with the brazen knocker, at first softly and then with growing anger; he considered it as certain that his wife had sought and found protection under the senator’s roof.  He could have shouted with rage and anguish, and yet he hardly thought of his wife and the danger of losing her, but only of Polykarp and the disgrace he had wrought upon him, and the reparation he would exact from him, and his parents, who had dared to tamper with his household rights—­his, the imperial centurion’s.

What was Sirona to him?  In the flush of an hour of excitement he had linked her destiny to his.

At Arelas, about two years since, one of his comrades had joined their circle of boon-companions, and had related that he had been the witness of a remarkable scene.  A number of young fellows had surrounded a boy and had unmercifully beaten him—­he himself knew not wherefore.  The little one had defended himself bravely, but was at last overcome by numbers.  “Then suddenly,” continued the soldier, “the door of a house near the circus opened, and a young girl with long golden hair flew out, and drove the boys to flight, and released the victim, her brother, from his tormentors.  She looked like a lioness,” cried the narrator, “Sirona she is called, and of all the pretty girls of Arelas, she is beyond a doubt the prettiest.”  This opinion was confirmed on all sides, and Phoebicius, who at that time had just been admitted to the grade of “lion” among the worshippers of Mithras, and liked very well to hear himself called “the lion,” exclaimed, “I have long been seeking a lioness, and here it seems to me that I have found one.  Phoebicius and Sirona—­the two names sound very finely together.”