THE INNER SHRINE OF JUPITER.


Alyrus crept out of the rear door of the house about sundown, while
Virgilia, her head pillowed on a cushion of soft down, was dreaming of
things past. He told Alexis to guard the entrance and if the master
inquired for him to tell him that a pair of sandals needed repairing
and he was carrying them to the shoemaker. In fact, he had the
sandals, of yellow Persian leather, wrapped up in an old handkerchief,
and showed them to the Greek.

While Alexis seated himself on the porter's marble bench just inside
the front door, left open that the evening breeze blowing fresh and
cool from the sea might pass through the heated rooms, Alyrus went
into the narrow alley at the rear. Just outside, a man crouched
against the brick wall. It was Lucius, the water-carrier, who had sung
the Christian hymn so boldly on the streets where pagan gods were
worshipped. His goat-skin water-bag was empty and lay, wrinkled and
collapsed, beside him.

Lucius, himself, was a strange sight in the midst of the luxurious
people of Rome. A peasant he was, dwelling in a cave far out on the
Roman Campagna, remote from the splendid villas and gardens lining the
wide ways leading out of the city to North and South and West. This
cave was in a mass of tufa rock rising abruptly from the flat, green
fields, and not far from the aqueduct, three tiers of brick arches,
one above the other, joined by massive masonry, through which fresh
water was brought in big leaden pipes to the city.

Hundreds of long-horned cattle, white and clean and strong, were