Then Ariston remembered that his master was away from home. He had gone
in a ship to Rome to get a great physician for his sick boy. He had left
Caius in the charge of his nurse, for the boy's mother was dead. But
now every slave had turned coward and had run away and left the little
master to die.

Ariston pulled the couch into one of the rooms. Here the roof kept off
the hail of stones.

"Your father is expected home to-day, master Caius," said the Greek. "He
will come. He never breaks his word. We will wait for him here. This
strange shower will soon be over."

So he sat on the edge of the couch, and the little Roman laid his head
in his slave's lap and sobbed. Ariston watched the falling pebbles. They
were light and full of little holes. Every now and then black rocks of
the size of his head whizzed through the air. Sometimes one fell into
the open cistern and the water hissed at its heat. The pebbles lay piled
a foot deep all over the courtyard floor. And still they fell thick and
fast.

"Will it never stop?" thought Ariston.

Several times the ground swayed under him. It felt like the moving of a
ship in a storm. Once there was thunder and a trembling of the house.
Ariston was looking at a little bronze statue that stood on a tall,
slender column. It tottered to and fro in the earthquake. Then it fell,
crashing into the piled-up stones. In a few minutes the falling shower
had covered it.