"There have been many disturbances of late," he spoke after a pause. "Roxana's lust for Theodora's power proved her undoing. Theodora will suffer no rival to threaten her with Marozia's fate." "I have heard it whispered she is assembling about her men who are ready to go to any extreme," Tristan interposed tentatively, thrown off his guard by Basil's affability of manner. The latter gave a start, but recovered himself. "Idle rumors. The Romans must have something to talk about. Odo of Cluny is thundering his denunciations with such fervid eloquence that they cannot but linger in the rabble's mind." "The hermit of Mount Aventine?" Tristan queried. "Even he! He has a strange craze, a doctrine of the End of Time, to be accomplished when the cycle of the sæculum has run its course. A doctrine he most furiously proclaims in language seemingly inspired, and which he promulgates to farther his own dark ends." "A theory most dark and strange," Tristan replied with a shudder, for he was far from free of the superstition of the times. Basil gave a shrug. His tone was lurid. "What shall it matter to us, who shall hardly tread this earth when the fateful moment comes?" "If it were true nevertheless?" Tristan replied meditatively. A sombre fire burnt in the eyes of the Grand Chamberlain. "Then, indeed, should we not pluck the flowers in our path, defying darkness and death and the fiery chariot of the All-destroyer that is to sweep us to our doom?" Tristan shuddered. Some such words he had indeed heard among the pilgrim throngs without clearly grasping their import. They had haunted his memory and had, for the time at least, laid a restraining hand upon his impulses. But the mystery of the Monk of Cluny weighed lightly against the mystery of the woman who held in the hollow of her hand the destinies of Rome. Basil seemed to read Tristan's thoughts. Reclining in his chair, he eyed him narrowly. "You, too, but narrowly escaped the blandishments of the Sorceress, blandishments to which many another would have succumbed. I marvel at your self-restraint, not being bound by any vow." The speaker paused and waited, his eyes lying in ambush under the dark straight brows. The memory still oppressed Tristan and the mood did not escape Basil, who stored it up for future reckoning. "Perchance I, too, might have succumbed to the Lady Theodora's beauty, had not something interposed at the crucial moment." "The memory of some earlier love, perchance?" Basil queried with a smile. Tristan gave a sigh. He thought of Hellayne and the impending meeting with Roger de Laval. His questioner abandoned the subject. Master in dissimulation he had read the truth on Tristan's brow. "Pray then to your guardian saint, if of such a one you boast," he continued after a pause, "to intervene, should temptation in its most alluring form face you again," he said with deliberate slowness. "You witnessed the end of Fabio of the Cavalli?"-- Tristan shuddered.