awaiting the whole family, including herself and Argutis, had not ceased to haunt her; but as to the empress, something seemed to have gone wrong, for why had the girl wet eyes and so sad a face?  What was all this long whispering with Argutis?  But it was no concern of hers, after all, and she would know all in good time, no doubt.  “What the masters plot to-day the slaves hear next week,” was a favorite saying of the Gauls, and she had often proved its truth.

But the cool way in which Melissa received the felicitations which the old woman poured out in honor of the future empress, and her tear-reddened eyes, seemed at any rate quite comprehensible.  The child was thinking, no doubt, of her handsome Diodoros.  Among the splendors of the palace she would soon forget.  And how truly magnificent were the dress and jewels in which the damsel had appeared in the amphitheatre!

“How they must have hailed her!” thought the old woman when she had helped Melissa to exchange her dress for a simpler robe, and the girl sat down to write.  “If only the mistress had lived to see this day!  And all the other women must have been bursting with envy.  Eternal gods!  But, after all, who knows whether the good luck we envy others is great or small?  Why, even in this house, which the gods have filled to the roof with gifts and favors, misfortune has crept in through the key hole.  Poor Philip!

“Still, if all goes well with the girl.  Things have befallen her such as rarely come to any one, and yet no more than her due.  The fairest and best will be the greatest and wealthiest in the empire.”

And she clutched the amulets and the cross which hung round her arm and throat, and muttered a hasty prayer for her darling.

Argutis, for his part, did not know what to think of it all.  He, if any one, rejoiced in the good fortune of his master and Melissa; but Heron’s promotion to the rank of praetor had been too sudden, and Heron demeaned himself too strangely in his purple-bordered toga.  It was to be hoped that this new and unexpected honor had not turned his brain!  And the state in which his master’s eldest son remained caused him the greatest anxiety.  Instead of rejoicing in the honors of his family, he had at his first interview with his father flown into a violent rage; and though he, Argutis, had not understood what they were saying, he perceived that they were in vehement altercation, and that Heron had turned away in great wrath.  And then—­he remembered it with horror, and could hardly tell what he had seen to Alexander and Melissa in a reasonable and respectful manner—­Philip had sprung out of bed, had dressed himself without help, even to his shoes, and scarcely had his father set out in his litter before Philip had come into the kitchen.  He looked like one risen from the grave, and his voice was hollow as he told the slaves that he meant to go to the Circus to see for himself that justice was done.  But Argutis felt his heart sink within him when the philosopher desired him to fetch the pipe his father used to teach the birds to whistle, and at the same time took up the sharp kitchen knife with which Argutis slaughtered the sheep.