“After kissing the image, I stood, still holding my father’s hand, to watch the flames.  I can see them now, crackling and writhing as they gained on the wood, licking it and fawning, as it were, till it caught and sent up a rush of sparks and fire.  At last the whole pile was one huge blaze.  Then, suddenly, out of the heart of the flames an eagle rose.  The creature flapped its broad wings in the air, which was golden with sunshine and quivering with heat, soaring above the smoke and fire, this way and that.  But it soon took flight, away from the furnace beneath.  I shouted with delight, and cried to my father:  ’Look at the bird!  Where is he flying?’ And he eagerly answered:  ’Well done!  If you desire to preserve the power I have conquered for you always undiminished, you must keep your eyes open.  Let no sign pass unnoticed, no opportunity neglected.’

“He himself acted on this rule.  To him obstacles existed only to be removed, and he taught me, too, to give myself neither peace nor rest, and not to spare the life of a foe.—­That festival secured my father the suffrages of the Romans.  Meanwhile Pescennius Niger rose up in the East with a large army and took the field against Severus.  But my father was not the man to hesitate.  Within a few months of the obsequies of Pertinax his opponent was a headless corpse.

“There was yet another obstacle to be removed.  You have heard of Clodius Albinus.  My father had adopted him and raised him to share his throne.  But Severus could not divide the rule with any man.

“When I was nine years old I saw, after the battle of Lugdunum, the dead face of Albinus’s head; it was set up in front of the Curia on a lance.

“I now was the second personage in the empire, next to my father; the first among the youth of the whole world, and the future emperor.  When I was eleven the soldiers hailed me as Augustus; that was in the war against the Parthians, before Ktesiphon.  But they did the same to Geta.  This was like wormwood in the sweet draught; and if then—­But what can a girl care about the state, and the fate of rulers and nations?”

“Yes, go on,” said Melissa.  “I see already what you are coming to.  You disliked the idea of sharing your power with another.”

“Nay,” cried Caracalla, vehemently, “I not only disliked it, it was intolerable, impossible!  What I want you to see is that I did not grudge my brother his share of my father’s inheritance, like any petty trader.  The world—­that is the point—­the world itself was too small for two of us.  It was not I, but Fate, which had doomed Geta to die.  I am certain of this, and so must you be.  Yes, it was Fate.  Fate prompted the child’s little hand to attempt its brother’s life.  And that was long before my brain could form a thought or my baby-lips could stammer his hated name.”

“Then you tried to kill your brother even in infancy?” asked Melissa, and her large eyes dilated with horror as she gazed at the terrible narrator.  But Caracalla went on, in an apologetic tone: