"None know him, great Caesar! He came from the mountains, and he
disappeared into the mountains. You marked the wildness and strange
beauty of his face. It is whispered that for once the great god Pan has
condescended to measure himself against a mortal."

The cloud cleared from Nero's brow. "Of course, Arsenius! You are
right! No man would have dared to brave me so. What a story for Rome!
Let the messenger leave this very night, Arsenius, to tell them how
their Emperor has upheld their honour in Olympia this day."



THROUGH THE VEIL.


He was a great shock-headed, freckle-faced Borderer, the lineal
descendant of a cattle-thieving clan in Liddesdale. In spite of his
ancestry he was as solid and sober a citizen as one would wish to see,
a town councillor of Melrose, an elder of the Church, and the chairman
of the local branch of the Young Men's Christian Association. Brown was
his name--and you saw it printed up as "Brown and Handiside" over the
great grocery stores in the High Street. His wife, Maggie Brown, was an
Armstrong before her marriage, and came from an old farming stock in the
wilds of Teviothead. She was small, swarthy, and dark-eyed, with a
strangely nervous temperament for a Scotch woman. No greater contrast
could be found than the big tawny man and the dark little woman; but
both were of the soil as far back as any memory could extend.

One day--it was the first anniversary of their wedding--they had driven
over together to see the excavations of the Roman Fort at Newstead.