The priestess took two swifter steps towards him. "Then why, O Lucius Flaccus, hast thou built here an altar to our Goddess Sul?" She pointed to the pedestal beside them; and he, answering not a word, stretched forth his hand and drew away the covering that concealed the apex.
There, in the fading light, there stood revealed the hated emblem of the Christian Faith.
"A cross!" she cried, "a cross!"
The sculptor raised his eyes and clasped his hands:
"The Cross of Him who died for all the world!"
THE VESTAL'S FATE.
The spirit of the dream had changed. A sense of horrible foreboding agonized the dreamer. No longer did the sculptor and the priestess look down upon Sulcastra. Yet the dreamer knew all that had happened and was happening still.
The city was in tumult. The baths, the public schools, the temples were deserted. People thronged the streets. There was but one thing spoken of—an outrage on the goddess whom they all revered. Lucius Flaccus, the favoured sculptor of Sulcastra, son of Julius the centurion, had erected on the threshold of her temple an altar to the God-Man of the Nazarenes. Nor was that all. The sacred fire that should have been kept burning in Sul's temple had been suffered to die out, if indeed it had not been deliberately extinguished; climax of all—Verenia, priestess of Sul, had been found in the broad light of day kneeling with bowed head before the hated emblem that profaned the grove. Amazement had given place to fury. The cry went up for punishment—a cry redoubled when it became known that the augurs foretold dire calamity for Sulcastra and the citizens, as the inevitable consequence of an outrage so profane. The people feared the vengeance of the gods!
Yet there were some who kept a grief-stricken silence in the midst of all the raging of the citizens, for each of the offenders was well esteemed, and both belonged to honoured Roman families. The dreadful fate that lay in store alike for the sculptor and the priestess moved many hearts to awe and anguished apprehension. In each case the appalling penalty was as certain as the dawn of day. Lucius Flaccus would be carried to the rock of Sul, high on the steepest hill that overlooked the valley, and thence cast headlong on the rocks below. For Verenia, the priestess, a yet more awful punishment was prepared—the slow starvation of a living tomb.