"Thou art a slave."

Alyrus bowed, keeping his eyes on his master and son, now approaching
the splendid white marble law-courts.

"What is thy country?"

"Beyond the seas, your reverence."

Alyrus turned a pair of black eyes on the questioner. In them
smouldered hidden passions.

"Your young master does not bow before Jupiter."

"No."

"And why, may I ask? His father is, I know, a faithful follower of our
gods. Why not his son, also?"

The portico, surmounted by a marvelous relief in marble, a copy of an
allegorical representation of jurisprudence, brought from Greece, was
in front of the slave and the priest. The lawyer and Martius had
already vanished in the cool shadows of the interior.

For one moment, Alyrus hesitated. It was an awful thing for a slave to
betray his master's son. He gave one backward thought to those days
when hundreds of horsemen acknowledged him chief, and date-palms waved
their feathery arms over his tent; he remembered that he was a slave,
bought with a price, and his master had struck him. And he remembered