He now made his way with feeble steps to the entrance where he was to meet his friend.  The blood throbbed in his temples, his mouth was parched, and, as a fruit-seller cried her wares from one of the archways, he took a few apples from her basket to refresh himself with their juice.  His hand trembled, and the experienced old woman, observing the bandage under his wreath, supposed him to be one of the excited malcontents who had perhaps already fallen into the hands of the lictors.  So, with a significant grin, she pointed under the table on which her fruit-baskets stood, and said “I have plenty of rotten ones.  Six in a wrapper, quite easy to hide under your cloak.  For whom you will.  Caesar has given the golden apple of Paris to a goddess of this town.  I should best like to see these flung at her brother, the sycophant.”

“Do you know them?” asked Diodoros, hoarsely.

“No,” replied the old woman.  “No need for that.  I have plenty of customers and good ears.  The slut broke her word with a handsome youth of the town for the sake of the Roman, and they who do such things are repaid by the avenging gods.”  Diodoros felt his knees failing under him, and a wrathful answer was on his lips, when the huckster suddenly shouted like mad:  “Caesar, Caesar!  He is coming.”

The shouts of the crowd hailing their emperor had already become audible through the heavy evening air, at first low and distant, and louder by degrees.  They now suddenly rose to a deafening uproar, and while the sound rolled on like approaching thunder, broken by shrill whistles suggesting lightning, the sturdy old apple-seller clambered unaided on to her table, and shouted with all her might: 

“Caesar!  Here he is!—­Hail, hail, hail to great Caesar!”

At the imminent risk of tumbling off her platform, she bent low down to reach under the table for the blue cloth which covered her store of rotten apples, snatched it off, and waved it with frantic enthusiasm, as though her elderly heart had suddenly gone forth to the very man for whom a moment ago she had been ready to sell her disgusting missiles.  And still she shouted in ringing tones, “Hail, hail, Caesar!” again and again, with all her might, till there was no breath left in her overbuxom, panting breast, and her round face was purple with the effort.  Nay, her emotion was so vehement that the bright tears streamed down her fat cheeks.

And every one near was shrieking like the applewoman, “Hail, Caesar!” and it was only where the crowd was densest that a sharp whistle now and then rent the roar of acclamations.

Diodoros, meanwhile, had turned to look at the main entrance, and, carried away by the universal desire to see, had perched himself on an unopened case of dried figs.  His tall figure now towered far above the throng, and he set his teeth as he heard the old woman, almost speechless with delight, gasp out: 

“Lovely! wonderful!  He would never have found the like in Rome.  Here, among us—­”