“I was coming out to seek the young scribe Timothy—I saw him once and helped him carry the Prophet in, when he was mobbed and stoned and left for dead in Lystra—I thought he’d help me back to my people!” The Idumean rose impatiently. “That spider maid! The vixen with Herod’s snaky blood! Go inside! I’ll lock the door! Prepare the Prophet his supper. I’ll to the Three Taverns to ferret this. Remember if you try to run away—there is no escape from Roman power in all the known world from Gaul to the Ganges; but I see one rich way of escape to fortune for you, and money for me to make me rich, if Bernice ever cast her eyes at you—might save young Titus, son of our General, falling a victim to her wiles! Go in, I say, and keep your tongue from blabbing—or I’ll cut it out with my dagger! Princess Bernice! Titus’ mistress! By Jupiter, ’tis my lucky day at last and I’ll make offerings to Fortune,” he muttered, striding off. The heart of the frightened boy almost stopped. He seemed to have jumped from danger close to death or torture. What had he told, or not told, that made him, a friendless Grecian boy in Imperial Rome, of great money value to the Idumean guard the minute Bernice’s name was mentioned? Why had the rough soldier called the young princess a “night monster,” “a spider maid,” “a vixen with snaky blood,” “a nymph” aiming a net at Titus, the son of the Roman General in Asia? Why should a girl princess not flee one old husband, married to silence evil tongues, and seek a younger mate in the General’s son? Wise, wise as seer or prophet is the intuition of youth; but stronger than the breastplate of Imperial Rome the innocence of youth; for the boy had not told all the truth. Something he held back for the love of the royal mistress, who had befriended him. He had not told the Idumean captain that when he had been handed over to the merchant of Colossé he had been sold by King Agrippa because his young master was jealous of his sister’s affections for a page; and when he had taken ship at Crete, dressed as a page, he was a runaway slave, with Princess Bernice’s gold in a goatskin wallet round his girdle, obeying her orders “to have no fear to go to Rome; she would meet him there: to wait.” To his youthful heart it seemed no evil thing that she should come to Rome and marry Titus, Vespasian’s son, where he again could be her page. He could not know that all Rome was now counting on General Vespasian to save the Empire and become Emperor. He would not have had long to wait, as destiny soon rolled the years to Vespasian’s triumphial entry into Rome—if the harpy women of the wine shops on the water front had not taken note of his beauty and set the bargemen on to kidnap him as bait for higher game in Nero’s Palace, where ruled an evil woman, guided only by her own wicked desires. * * * * *