and with the other--"

His wife had sprung to her feet with writhing features.

"Marcus!" she cried. "My beautiful Marcus! Oh, you brute! you brute!
you brute!" There was a clatter of tea-cups as she fell forward
senseless upon the table.

They never talk about that strange isolated incident in their married
life. For an instant the curtain of the past had swung aside, and some
strange glimpse of a forgotten life had come to them. But it closed
down, never to open again. They live their narrow round--he in his
shop, she in her household--and yet new and wider horizons have vaguely
formed themselves around them since that summer evening by the crumbling
Roman fort.



AN ICONOCLAST.


It was daybreak of a March morning in the year of Christ 92. Outside
the long Semita Alta was already thronged with people, with buyers and
sellers, callers and strollers, for the Romans were so early-rising a
people that many a Patrician preferred to see his clients at six in the
morning. Such was the good republican tradition, still upheld by the
more conservative; but with more modern habits of luxury, a night of
pleasure and banqueting was no uncommon thing. Thus one, who had
learned the new and yet adhered to the old, might find his hours
overlap, and without so much as a pretence of sleep come straight from