“I must reluctantly confess he hath a pretty taste,” said Tertullus; “she is a delicious armful.” “And she is desirous, you see, that we should observe the fact,” remarked Rufus. The girl in question was a lovely brunette, attired in a Coan robe which, even in that decadent age, was deemed a trifle too extreme, consisting as it did of silk so transparent in texture that the shapely limbs of the wearer could be seen as through colored glass. And, be it observed, she was not the only female at the banquet thus diaphanously clad! “That’s the girl,” continued Rufus, “to please whom he burnt in his own house the incense that it is not lawful to burn anywhere save upon the altar of the Jewish temple. And as she was once curious to view the Jewish worship, Ananias had the way from his house to the temple carpeted for her pretty feet, and canopied to shield her from the sun. And he himself was so fastidiously minded that he was accustomed to wear silk gloves at the altar to avoid soiling his dainty fingers with the blood of the sacrifices,[1] though why a Sadducee, such as he, should want to worship God at all is a mystery to me. In the opinion of Ananias man dies as a dog dies. It seems to me that a God who creates man from dust merely to turn him into dust again is scarcely deserving of worship. What say you?” “Old Homer could have taught him better doctrine than that,” returned Crispus. The conversation, it will be seen, was taking a theological turn; something of like sort was happening at the adjoining triclinium of Florus. “I hate these Christians as much as you do,” remarked the procurator to Berenice. “But Nero hath taught us how to deal with them. And you say there are still some of this sect at Jerusalem? I had thought that my predecessor Albinus, in slaying James, the brother of this Christus, had put an end to these fanatics. You shall have your way, princess. Within a week of my coming to Jerusalem there shall not be a Christian left alive.” “Now the gods confound these Christians!” said Tertullus aloud. “They grow daily wilder and madder in their blasphemies. They have now the effrontery to affirm that this Christus of theirs, who died in the eighteenth year of Tiberius Cæsar, was something more than a man, that this Galilæan peasant was in very truth a manifestation of the supreme deity, the creator of the universe, and the great TO PAN spoken of by the divine Plato.” At these words there was on the part of Crispus a start as of surprise. “When do you say this Christus died?” he asked somewhat quickly. “In the eighteenth year of Tiberius Cæsar,” replied Tertullus. “In what month?” “On the fourteenth of Nisan, according to the Jewish calendar.” “Which in our style would be the seventh of April,” explained Rufus, after a rapid mental calculation. Crispus’ surprise seemed to deepen. “And you say the Christians call their founder TO PAN? Strange!” he murmured. “Why so?” asked Florus.