The empress-mother, old Helena, continually and skillfully directed the suspicions of her dark-souled, bloody son against the Empress Fausta herself; and, when she had prepared her vengeance so that she thought it could not fail, she accused Fausta of infidelity to the emperor, with that same Pilus, of the imperial guardsmen. Many craftily prepared circumstances corroborated the infamous and degrading accusation, and quickly and secretly the emperor put his wife to death. "Small recompense for my great wrong," murmured Helena, "but all that I can take; for the woman’s beautiful sons are also mine own grandchildren." "I have no friend on earth," mused Constantine, "except my mother and Eusebius of Cæsarea." When the gloomy old prisoner of the Illyrian fortress heard of the murder of Fausta, upon this disgraceful charge of adultery with a guardsman, he said: "The grand name of Constantine is soaked with domestic blood and draggled in domestic filth. The royal oecumenical council beareth such strange and deadly fruit." The officers of the fortress were held to be accountable with their lives for the heretic’s safe-keeping, and vigilant spies reported to Constantine almost every word he uttered, and stole and transmitted to the emperor almost every line he wrote, and the old man’s gloomy comments upon the condition of the Church, and his strange and seemingly inspired interpretations of prophecy, which he supposed to relate to Constantine and his new city of Constantinople, built upon seven hills, above the narrow straits whereto the commerce of the world resorted, doubtless aided Fausta’s and Helena’s conspiracies to lead him into the commission of those horrible crimes which shocked the moral sense of the world, and justified the pagans in breathless wonder as to what new atrocities would follow the legal establishment of the Christian faith--atrocities that perhaps afterward drove Julian the Apostate to struggle for the restoration of paganism. And doubtless Arius himself would long ago have perished, if the emperor had not hoped to obtain from his manuscripts and prophecies warning of every coming danger. CHAPTER XII. AN IMPERIAL REPENTANCE.