The proconsul raised his head and looked at her with such speechless ferocity, that she shrank away from him, remembering former experiences. But he dropped his head into his hands and did nothing.
She watched him for a moment then ventured discreetly:
"Is it thy wish to win him from her, or her from him?"
"Both!" he answered. "The one accomplished, the other follows!" With a sudden accession of emotion, he laid his short, powerful fingers about her smooth wrist and bent over her.
"Help me, Junia!" he besought. "Weigh what I offer against the portion of any Alexandrian. By the lips of Lysimachus, the richest man in the city, I know how little even he may waste—two hundred thousand drachmæ—the cost of a single necklace Cæsar might put about thy throat. I never failed Tiberius; his esteem of me is great. I have only to ask and the decree of banishment, or the sentence against thy father, shall be lifted. Thou shalt return in honor to Rome; thy father shall be one of Cæsar's ministers, and thou shalt take thy place among the first of the patricians. And Tiberius lays no bond of fidelity upon his ladies. I saw thee, last night! I saw thee run thine eyes along the Herod's sleek length—curse him, it was that which undid me! I saw thy fancy incline toward him. It will be a new and pleasant game for thee, Junia—a game in which thou art skilled—but it is my life—my very life to me!"
She frowned at the jewels on her fingers. There was no reason why she should not lend herself to Flaccus' schemes when her enlistment in his cause assured to her the realization of the highest ambitions of her kind. But enough of the creature impulse toward perversity, admitting that his gain would be as great as hers, restrained her. She was uncomfortable, uncertain, peevish. Meanwhile, the proconsul's gray-brown eyes, large, intense, demanded of her.
"Wait!" she fretted at last. "Thou art hasty! And perchance thou dost only make place for this mysterious fugitive for whom she was so solicitous last night!"
He remembered his own jest with the alabarch, and added thereto the impatient surmise of this penetrative woman. Could such a thing be possible? He sprang to his feet, all the intensity of his emotion concentrated in a spasm of fury and menace.
"Let him come!" he said between his teeth. "Let him come!"
She worked her hand loose from him.