‘The terms made are not to be carried out, on your side, until you are satisfied with your bargain. That is enough to show, of itself, that I am in earnest. I must live, and to your own generosity I leave the payment. But it is not altogether that for which I am here. Your nephew, the worshipful knight, has dealt very scurvily with me, after his nature. He is a hundred times more rascal than myself—a mean, cowardly dog, knight as he is. I have two surprises in store for him—one, when he is confronted with the girl he paid me to kill, and the other, when his eyes fall on me, whom he struck down one night, not long since, in the streets, and left for dead. He thought, when he did that, his secret was for ever safe. But I was picked up with a hole in my side, and so well tended in a house I can take you to, that, after a hard fight of it, I came round. I bethought me of the girl I had left in Surrentum, and I stole away to see how she fared, and to pick up strength. I have been living for weeks, waiting and watching in my sister’s house; for it was my sister, and her husband, the potter, who took her from me. They have loved her like their own child, and she treats them as her parents, for she knows nothing to the contrary. Watch well your nephew, therefore, when he first sets eyes on me—if his conscience don’t visibly trouble him it will be strange. But there is more yet to be told you, and we are wasting time. When I came away, matters in my sister’s house were in a bad state. Masthlion had gone to Capreae, to show Caesar some new kind of glass he had discovered. He was a fool and it cost him his life; for he found the bloody tyrant in the humour to reward him with a bed at the bottom of the sea. And more than that, a gang of slaves, from the palace, I suppose, arrived after dark, and sacked the house, and took off the girl back with them. You must understand she has uncommon good looks, and is good prey for this island, which is no place for her. Now you know what reason there is for haste to protect her. I could do nothing; but you are a patrician and powerful, and to you Caesar will listen.’ ‘Alas, you told me she was alive and well, and now you say Tiberius has carried her off to his island—is this your good news?’ cried Fabricius, wringing his hands. ‘Better indeed dead, I should say, than left to the mercy of that debauched old man! Four days since you left, and as long for me to go thither, what hope is there? Why did you not bring her away at once? Here, in this house, the house from which you say you took her, you might have proved your words, or damned yourself for ever. You bid me hope, and then dash hope away. Alive—ay, but if alive, most likely in a living death—Oh!’