"Then you tried to kill your brother even in infancy?" asked Melissa, and
her large eyes dilated with horror as she gazed at the terrible narrator.
But Caracalla went on, in an apologetic tone:

"I was then but two years old. It was at Mediolanum, soon after Geta's
birth. An egg was found in the court of the palace; a hen had laid it
close to a pillar. It was of a purple hue-red all over like the imperial
mantle, and this indicated that the newly born infant was destined to
sovereignty. Great was the rejoicing. The purple marvel was shown even
to me who could but just walk. I, like a naughty boy, flung it down; the
shell cracked, and the contents poured out on the pavement. My mother
saw it, and her exclamation, 'Wicked child, you have murdered your
brother!' was often repeated to me in after-years. It never struck me as
particularly motherly."

Here he paused, gazing meditatively into vacancy, and then asked the
girl, who had listened intently:

"Were you never haunted by a word so that you could not be rid of it?"

"Oh, yes," cried Melissa; "a striking rhythm in a song, or a line of
poetry--"

Caracalla nodded agreement, and went on more vehemently: "That is what I
experienced at the words, 'You have murdered your brother!' I not only
heard them now and then with my inward ear, but incessantly, like the
dreary hum of the flies in my camp-tent, for hours at a time, by day and
by night. No fanning could drive these away. The diabolical voice
whispered loudest when Geta had done anything to vex me; or if things had