It was Flaccus!
For a single moment of surprise and bewilderment, Marsyas stood still. Then very surely it penetrated through his brain that the proconsul had recognized him at the moment of Flora's drop into his arms, and had come to capture him—or to identify the Dancing Flora!
He knew that he had not struck a fatal blow and the proconsul's knife lay near. He picked it up.
It was bloody.
Startled and aghast, he flung the weapon away, and, leaping over the unconscious Roman, fled out of the alley. A torch of pitch, burnt down to a charred knot, with a feeble flame playing over it, was set upon a staff hardly ten paces from the mouth of the passage. It was a dark street, and deserted. The roar of the populace still centered about the square of the Temple of Rannu. Marsyas turned toward the torch, and, as he ran, he saw under its sickly light the figure of a man stretched on the earth. At another step, he tripped over a second fallen body. It moved and groaned.
Marsyas put Lydia down. Carrying her through a street cumbered with prostrate men might mean bodily injury for both of them. With a reassuring word, he led her between the head of the obscured man and the feet of the one under the torch, and stumbled at his second step on a contorted shape.
Marsyas stopped, to ask himself if the deadly hand that had brought these men low might not await him and his dear charge farther on. Vasti leaned over the one under the torch. Then she sprang up.
"Come! Look!" she whispered in excitement.
Marsyas hurried to the man, and met at that instant the last conscious light in the eyes of Agrippa.
The young Essene dropped to his knees without a word, thrust his hand into the embroidered tunic and felt for the prince's heart. It beat but slowly. Vasti, meanwhile, snatched the torch from the staff and beat the charred pitch knot on the ground till the still inflammable heart broke open and ignited afresh.