"The King and you both entered the trap of my warnings. I rejoiced at your readiness to believe in Hilderic's guilt, because you--desired it; because with secret, though repressed eagerness, you longed for the crown. Even though you dethroned Hilderic in good faith, how alert, how ardent you were to secure the throne! I aided, I saw you strike down poor Hoamer, who was perfectly right when he denied Hilderic's purpose of murder. You called the duel a judgment of God, you believed you thereby served Heaven's justice, and you served only your own lust for power and, through it, _me_! Your passion--stimulated by Satan, not God--gave you the impulse, the swift strength of arm, to which Hoamer instantly succumbed. It was a devil's judgment, a victory of hell, not a decree of God. Now I became your chancellor; that is, your destroyer. I quarrelled openly with the Emperor; I negotiated secretly with the Empress. I sent your fleet to Sardinia, after learning the day before that Belisarius had set sail with his army. After the battle of Decimum, I advised you to shut yourself with your troops in Carthage. The game would then have been over six months earlier, but this one move failed,--you would not accept my counsel. I was obliged to guard against Hilderic's vindicating himself, so I took out of the chest before I let Hilderic search it, the warning letter, which I had dictated. But I could permit no scion of Genseric's race to live: Justinian would have received your two captives with honors after the victory of Belisarius! I had them killed by my freedman and secured his escape. But you--I had long reserved it for the hour of your greatest supremacy, in case of the most extreme peril of our plans--you I crushed at the right moment by the revelation that you had dethroned Hilderic without cause and then murdered him. But my mother's curse and my oath would not be fulfilled until you walked in chains as Justinian's captive. "Therefore, to prevent your escape, I shared all the suffering, all the privations, of these last three months. Letters from King Theudis, directly after the battle of Decimum, had offered you rescue through the coast tribes by the galleys of the Visigoths. You never saw those letters; I suppressed them. Not until deliverance really beckoned, when you already stretched your hand toward it, did I strip off the mask to destroy you utterly. Now I shall see you kiss Justinian's feet in the hippodrome at Constantinople; this is the final consummation of my mother's curse, my oath, and my people's vengeance." He ceased, his face glowing, his eyes flashing down at the prisoner. Gelimer stooped and kissed the shoe in Verus's stirrup.