Intrigues, scandals, gossipings, suspicions continually arose at Macellum among the numberless idle servants. The whole pack of varletry, in the hope of Court favour, subjected the two disgraced young princes to espionage by night and day. Long as Julian could remember, death was an hourly expectation. Little by little he had accustomed himself to perpetual fear, being quite aware that neither in the house nor garden could he take a step or make a gesture unperceived by a thousand intent but invisible eyes. Hearing and understanding much of the toils about him, the boy was forced to feign ignorance. At one time it was the conversation between Eutropius and a spy sent by the Emperor Constantius, in which the monk named Julian and Gallus "the imperial scourges"; at another time, in the gallery under the kitchen windows, it was the meditation of a cook, furious at some insolence on the part of Gallus. She was saying to the washer-up of the dishes, "God save my soul, Priscilla, but what I can't make out is, why they haven't strangled them before!" To-day, when Julian, after his lesson in theology, went out of the house and perceived the greenness of the trees, he breathed more freely. The two peaks of Mount Argæus, covered with snow, sparkled against blue sky. The neighbourhood of glaciers made the air refreshingly cool; garden alleys stretched hither and thither into the distance; glistening dark-green foliage of oaks formed thick vaultings; here and there a ray filtered through the branches of plane-trees. Only one side of the garden was not walled in, for in that direction lay a chasm. At the foot of the plateau on which the castle stood, a dead plain stretched as far as Anti-Taurus, and from this plain fierce heat rose in mist, while in the garden fresh streams were running and little waterfalls tinkling through thickets of oleanders. A century before the date of which we are speaking Macellum had been the favourite domain and pleasure-house of the luxurious and half-mad Ariarathes, king of Cappadocia. Julian took his way towards an isolated grotto, hard by the precipice, in which a statue of the god Pan, playing the flute, stood over a little sacrificial altar. Outside the grotto, a lion's mouth jetted water into a stone basin, and a curtain of roses masked the entrance while letting through its branches a view of the undulating hills and the plain, far down and drowned in misty blue. The perfume of roses filled the little cave, and the air there would have been oppressive had it not been cooled by a stream channelled in the rocky floor. The wind scattered the turf with yellow petals of roses, and flung them floating on the water of the basin. From the dark and warm place of shelter could be heard the humming of bees. There Julian, stretched on the moss, used to read the _Banquet_ of Plato, understanding nothing of many of the passages; but their beauty had for him a double relish because it was a fruit forbidden.