upon the beloved corpse; and now, by the light of the lamps which had been brought, he saw that the little ruby capsule, containing poison, in the ring which had once belonged to Cleopatra, and which Theodora wore upon her little finger, had been opened--the Empress had killed herself! Upon the lemonwood table lay a strip of parchment, upon which was written her favourite motto: 'To live is to rule by means of beauty.' We were still in doubt whether it was the tortures of her malady or the discovery of her threatened fall which had driven her to this desperate deed. But our doubts were soon solved. When the news of Theodora's death spread through the palace, Theophilos, the Emperor's door-keeper, hurried, half desperate, into the chamber of death, threw himself at the Emperor's feet, and confessed that he guessed the connection. He had been for years in the secret service of the Empress, and every time that the Emperor held an audience to which he had given orders that the Empress was not to be admitted, he (the doorkeeper) had apprised the latter of it. She had then almost always heard the most secret councils of the Emperor from a hiding-place in the doorway of an adjacent chamber. Thus yesterday he had, as usual, informed the Empress that we were to have an audience, to which he had been particularly ordered not to admit her. Presently she had entered her hiding-place, but she had scarcely heard a few words spoken by Antonina and Anicius, when, with a smothered cry, she had sank half fainting behind the curtains; but, quickly rising, she had made a sign to him to keep silence, and then disappeared.--Narses pressed the Emperor to question Galatea upon the rack, but Justinian said, 'I will inquire no further.' "Day and night he remained alone near the corpse of the still beloved woman, after which he caused her to be interred, with the highest imperial honours, in the church of St. Sophia. It was officially published that the Empress had been suffocated by charcoal fumes while sleeping. The tripod, with the ashes, was publicly exposed. But that night had made Justinian an old man. The complete agreement of the evidence of Antonina, Anicius, Belisarius, Photius, the slaves of Antonina, the litter-bearers who had taken you to Belisarius's house before his arrest--all fully proved that you, in conjunction with the Empress, had persuaded Belisarius, through Antonina, to place himself seemingly at the head of the conspirators; and I swore to the fact that a few weeks ago he had expressed to me his just anger at the project of Photius.