Scarcely able to grasp the momentous truth Crispus stood like one enchanted to stone, silently staring at Vashti and her ring. To think that his marriage with Berenice, the ugly black incubus that had so long oppressed him, was the mere figment of his own imagination! that the sweet Christian maiden, whom he had loved from the first hour of seeing her, should be his wife, was a revelation so astounding that it was no wonder that at first he could not give it credence. Vashti gave a low, sweet laugh at his bewilderment. “I am your wife, Crispus. Won’t you protect me?” Protect her? He put his arm about her waist--a dozen men could not have torn her from his grasp!--and turned to face Berenice, who for the moment was almost as much bewildered and amazed as Crispus himself. “Prettily acted!” sneered she. “A scheme, artfully preconcerted, for the purpose of robbing me of my slave. But it shall not succeed. That Crispus wedded someone at Beth-tamar we must believe, since Cæsar himself affirms it; but I require something more than this girl’s word, ere I shall believe her to be the wife of Crispus.” “I can confirm her statement,” said Josephus, intervening at this point, “since it was I who conducted Vashti to Beth-tamar, and from behind a curtain saw her wedded to the lord Crispus. And the woman who attended Vashti during the ceremony was my mother, who is here present to bear her testimony, if need be.” “And in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established, princess,” remarked Alexander. Berenice though striving to maintain a calm exterior, was nevertheless full of a secret rage at finding her intended victim slipping from her hands. “What if she be the wife of Crispus? She is none the less my slave.” “What? Rob a Roman noble of his wife?” interjected Alexander. “O, too bad!” “At the time I made the gift I knew not that she was the wife of Crispus,” remarked Titus, not at all displeased with the turn events were taking. “That matters not,” returned Berenice. “The gift, if made in due legal form, as this was, can be revoked neither by you nor by a court of law.” Crispus smiled pityingly at the baffled princess. “I have here,” said he, drawing forth a papyrus-scroll, “a document that bears a date long anterior to the time when Vashti was made a slave, a document that threatens death to those who seek to take the wife of Crispus from him. It bears the autograph signature of one whose authority not even Titus Cæsar himself will venture to dispute, for the signature is that of his august sire, Flavius Vespasian.”