But gradually he seemed to realise that he was weeping alone, and his dim eyes wandered around the apartment with a vague consciousness that there must be some one else here who owed to Sophronia's manes the tribute of tears. There stood Manlius, with a cold, unsympathising face, talking to Carinus. Not a feature betrayed the slightest sorrow. Mesembrius indignantly grasped the youth's arm. "And have _your_ eyes no tears, when your bride lies murdered before you?" Seized with suspicion Carinus suddenly looked at Manlius; the courtiers, with malicious pleasure, turned toward him. "My bride?" asked Manlius, in a tone of astonishment. "Your mind is wandering, old Mesembrius." "Have the Furies robbed you of your reason that you no longer remember that, but three days ago, you asked for my daughter's hand and I gave it to you?" "Your daughter's hand, certainly," replied Manlius, with unshaken calmness. "Not this daughter's here, however, but Glyceria's." "May you be accursed!" shouted Mesembrius, with savage fury, and without heeding the Caesar, his dead daughter, or the danger threatening him, he rushed out of the hall like a madman. This very thing saved him. "Follow him, Galga!" shouted Carinus. "Seize him. This man's head must be laid at my feet." Meanwhile Mesembrius rushed through the palace. The throng of slaves shrank back in terror at the sight of his agitated face, and allowed him to reach the open air. His frantic words instantly gathered a crowd around him, and by the time Galga, at the head of a troop of mounted praetorians, went in pursuit of him, the mob had attained threatening proportions. But the Thracian giant dashed recklessly through the masses of people. As he stretched his arm from the saddle to seize the old man's head and sever it from the trunk with a single stroke of his sword, the Roman, with strength wholly unexpected in a man of his age, dealt the brown-skinned colossus such a blow with his heavy crutch that he fell from his horse with a shattered skull. Mesembrius swung himself into the saddle at a bound, and led the infuriated populace against the armed cohort, which was scattered in a moment, and before reinforcements arrived to quell the tumult, the old patrician had disappeared and was never found. CHAPTER X. Manlius remained with Carinus to amuse him; he taught the dancing girls the dazzling arts of the Indian bayaderes, and conquered Aevius by producing on every occasion, and at every toast, distiches more apt and beautiful than the court poet could fabricate. During a single evening Carinus gave the now universally envied favourite a hundred thousand sestertiae, and, when he learned from him that the Teutonic women, by means of a special kind of soap, dyed their hair amber-yellow, he promised Manlius to appoint him Governor of Gallia that he might send him some of this soap which turned the hair yellow--at that period a hue ridiculously fashionable in the aristocratic society of Rome.