Following his indication, their eyes rested on the sculptured figure of a woman, cut from Parian marble. It was a drowsy image, the head fallen upon a hand, the lids drooping, the relaxation of all the muscles giving softness and pliability to the pose. So perfect was the work that the marble promised to be yielding to the touch. Some imitator of Phidias had achieved his masterpiece in this. Indeed, at first glance there was startlement for the four. A warm human flush had mantled the stone, and Marsyas' brows drew together, but he could not obey the old Essenic teaching and drop his eyes. "A statue?" Capito asked, uncertainly taking his withered chin between thumb and forefinger. "A statue," Agrippa assured him. "The illumination is from the batement light above. Come nearer!" He led them to the angle in which the image stood, not more than three paces from the wall. "It is my grandsire's queen, Mariamne," he continued softly, for ordinary tones awakened ghostly echoes in the haunted hall. "Murdered Mariamne!" the old man whispered with sudden intensity. "He loved her, and killed her in the fury of his love. They said that the king was wont to come in the morning when the sun stood there, drive out the attendants so that none might hear, and cling about this fair marble's knees in such agony of passion and remorse and grief that life would desert him. They would come in time to find him there, stretched on the pavement, cold and inert, to all purposes dead! And it was said that these groins here above held echoes of his awful grief after he had been borne away." Capito shivered. "What punishment!" he exclaimed. "Punishment! They who curse Herod's memory could not, if they had their will, visit such torture upon him as he invented for himself!" But Capito was lost now in contemplation of the statue. "She was beautiful," he said after a silence. "Didst ever see her?" Agrippa asked eagerly. The collector's back was turned to the prince, that he might have the advantageous view, and he answered with rapt eyes. "Once; through an open gate which led into her own garden. So I saw her in the lightest of vestments, for the day was warm and half of her beauty usually hidden was unveiled." "Well for thee my grandsire never knew," Agrippa put in, leaning against one of the cestophori which guarded a blank panel in the wall. "He never knew; but I would have died before I would give over the memory of it. She was slight, willowy, with the eyes of an Attic antelope, yet braver and more commanding than any woman-eye that ever bewitched me. Her mouth--Praxiteles would have turned from Lais' lips to hers." Agrippa's hand slid down the side of the cestophorus and fumbled a little within the edge of the molding. "Her hair was loose," the old man went on, "the sole drapery of her bosom--a very cloud of night loomed into filaments--"