The city was in tumult. The baths, the public schools, the temples were deserted. People thronged the streets. There was but one thing spoken of--an outrage on the goddess whom they all revered. Lucius Flaccus, the favoured sculptor of Sulcastra, son of Julius the centurion, had erected on the threshold of her temple an altar to the God-Man of the Nazarenes. Nor was that all. The sacred fire that should have been kept burning in Sul's temple had been suffered to die out, if indeed it had not been deliberately extinguished; climax of all--Verenia, priestess of Sul, had been found in the broad light of day kneeling with bowed head before the hated emblem that profaned the grove. Amazement had given place to fury. The cry went up for punishment--a cry redoubled when it became known that the augurs foretold dire calamity for Sulcastra and the citizens, as the inevitable consequence of an outrage so profane. The people feared the vengeance of the gods! Yet there were some who kept a grief-stricken silence in the midst of all the raging of the citizens, for each of the offenders was well esteemed, and both belonged to honoured Roman families. The dreadful fate that lay in store alike for the sculptor and the priestess moved many hearts to awe and anguished apprehension. In each case the appalling penalty was as certain as the dawn of day. Lucius Flaccus would be carried to the rock of Sul, high on the steepest hill that overlooked the valley, and thence cast headlong on the rocks below. For Verenia, the priestess, a yet more awful punishment was prepared--the slow starvation of a living tomb. The dreadful preparations were complete. The Vestal's grave was ready--a narrow niche in the massive stone foundations of the Temple--the temple of that goddess whose worship she had mocked. In this tiny cell was placed a pallet, a lamp that when lighted would burn for forty hours, and a small quantity of food. All knew what course the funeral ceremonies would follow. The Pontifex would read some prayers over the doomed priestess, but without the lustrations and other expiatory ceremonies that were used at the burial of the dead. When the last prayer had been uttered, the lictors would let her down into the vault, the entrance would be filled with slabs of stone, then covered up with earth. The awful hours, the agonizing days, would slowly pass. The lamp would flicker and the light expire. Deep silence that no shriek could pierce would shut the buried vestal from the ken of all who loved her. The food would fail; then, slowly, hour by hour, and day by day, the dreadful sentence of the law would be fulfilled. No father, mother, lover, friend, could save the victim, or by one iota lessen the torture of starvation, or that still greater torture of the brain to which her judges had condemned her.