"Help me, Junia!" he besought. "Weigh what I offer against the portion of any Alexandrian. By the lips of Lysimachus, the richest man in the city, I know how little even he may waste--two hundred thousand drachmae--the cost of a single necklace Caesar might put about thy throat. I never failed Tiberius; his esteem of me is great. I have only to ask and the decree of banishment, or the sentence against thy father, shall be lifted. Thou shalt return in honor to Rome; thy father shall be one of Caesar's ministers, and thou shalt take thy place among the first of the patricians. And Tiberius lays no bond of fidelity upon his ladies. I saw thee, last night! I saw thee run thine eyes along the Herod's sleek length--curse him, it was that which undid me! I saw thy fancy incline toward him. It will be a new and pleasant game for thee, Junia--a game in which thou art skilled--but it is my life--my very life to me!" She frowned at the jewels on her fingers. There was no reason why she should not lend herself to Flaccus' schemes when her enlistment in his cause assured to her the realization of the highest ambitions of her kind. But enough of the creature impulse toward perversity, admitting that his gain would be as great as hers, restrained her. She was uncomfortable, uncertain, peevish. Meanwhile, the proconsul's gray-brown eyes, large, intense, demanded of her. "Wait!" she fretted at last. "Thou art hasty! And perchance thou dost only make place for this mysterious fugitive for whom she was so solicitous last night!" He remembered his own jest with the alabarch, and added thereto the impatient surmise of this penetrative woman. Could such a thing be possible? He sprang to his feet, all the intensity of his emotion concentrated in a spasm of fury and menace. "Let him come!" he said between his teeth. "Let him come!" She worked her hand loose from him. "Wait," she repeated. "Thou hast built gigantically on no foundation. Let something happen. And if I am pleased to follow thy plans, I may; but be assured if I am not, I will not. My debt to thee is less than thy demands, Avillus." She arose and put on her mantle, while he stood watching her every movement. "I shall wait," he said presently, "only a little time." She made a motion of impatience and withdrew from the atrium. He stood motionless for a long time; then he called his atriensis. "Send hither the chief apparitor," he said. The captain of the proconsul's personal guard appeared and saluted. Flaccus, in the meantime, had searched through the documents on the floor and by the dim light identified one. "Take this," he said, handing the apparitor the parchment, "and make search for the man herein described. Seek him in Ptolemais, wherever a Nazarene warren hides, in Jerusalem, in Alexandria--meet every incoming ship, spend the half of my fortune, wear out my army--but find him, or lose thy life!"