“Oh, brother!—but thou hast not! tell me, my lord, that thy hand is free from this bloody crime!” “He sleeps beneath thee. It is upon his sarcophagus thou sittest.” She started with a piercing shriek from the coffin where she sat, knelt beside it, and strove to remove the heavy stone lid, which had been already securely fastened. While thus engaged the Lucumo drew aside with his hand the curtain which concealed the picture. “Look,” said he, “woman, behold the fate which thou and thy paramour have received—behold the task which I had set me when first I had been shown thy perjuries. Look!” She arose in silence from her knees, and turned her eyes upon the picture. As the curtain was slowly unrolled from before it, and she conceived the awful subject, and distinguished, under the care of the good and guardian genii, the shades of well-known members of the Pomponian family, her interest was greatly excited; but when following in the train and under the grasp of the Etrurian demon, she beheld the features of the young Roman who was doomed, she bounded forward with a cry of agony. “My brother, my Flavius, my own, my only brother!” and sunk down with outstretched arms before the melancholy shade. “Her brother!” exclaimed the husband. She heard the words and rose rapidly to her feet. “Ay, Flavius, my brother, banished from Rome, and concealed here in thy house of silence, concealed even from thee, my husband, as I would not vex thee with the anxieties of an Etrurian noble, lest Rome should hear and punish the people, by whom her outlaw was protected. Thou know’st my crime. This paramour was the brother of my heart—child of the same sire and dame—a noble heart, a pure spirit, whose very virtues have been the cause of his disgrace at Rome. Slay me, if thou wilt, but tell me not, O, Cœlius, that thou hast put the hands of hate upon my brother!” “Thy tale is false, woman—well-planned, but false. Know I not thy brother? Did I not know thy brother well in Rome? Went we not together oft? I tell thee, I should know him among a line of ten thousand Romans!” “Alas! alas! my husband, if ever I had brother, then is this he. I tell thee nothing but the truth. Of a surety, when thou wert in Rome, my brother was known to thee, but the boy has now become a man. Seven years have wrought a change upon him of which thou hast not thought. Believe me, what I tell thee—the youth whom I sheltered in this vault, and to whom I brought food nightly, was, indeed, my brother—my Flavius, the only son of my mother, who sent him to me, with fond words of entreaty, when the consuls of the city bade him depart in banishment.” “I cannot believe thee, woman. It were a mortal agony, far beyond what I feel in the conviction of thy guilt, were I to yield faith to thy story. It is thy paramour whom I have slain, and who sleeps in that tomb. His portrait and his judgment are before thee, and now—look on thine own!”