“My child!” Causidiena cried, “this is sacrilege!” “Not a bit of it!” Brinnaria maintained, a tall, white shape in the star-shine, waving her armful of clothing. “I have pored over the statutes of the order. It was incumbent on me to keep still and silent all through my licking. But I defy you or any other Vestal or any Pontiff or Flamen or either of the Emperors to show me a word on the statutes of the order or in any other sacred writing that forbids a Vestal, after her thrashing, to beat the Pontifex to red pulp. I have. You’d better go help him; he might die. And poor Numisia needs reviving. I’m all right; send me Utta and the salt and turpentine, and I’ll be fit for duty in a day or two.” “You terrible child!” said Causidiena. CHAPTER IX - ALARMS THE next year was the year of the great pestilence. Pestilence, indeed, had ravaged Italy for five consecutive summers previous to that year. But the great pestilence, for two centuries afterwards spoken of merely as “the pestilence,” fell in the nine hundred and nineteenth year after the founding of Rome, the year 166 of our era, when Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had been co-Emperors for a little more than five years and Brinnaria had been almost five years a Vestal. It devastated the entire Empire from Nisibis in upper Mesopotamia to Segontium, opposite the isle of Anglesea. Every farm, hamlet and village suffered; in not one town did it leave more than half the inhabitants alive; few cities escaped with so much as a third of the population surviving. Famine accompanied the pestilence in all the western portions of the Roman world, and from famine perished many whom the plague had spared.