Agrippa addressed himself to the alabarch, and between Marsyas and Classicus there stood no saving obstruction. Marsyas' nostrils quivered; he had fleeting but perfect summaries of the wrongs the man had worked against him. To find him now a guest entertained under the roof he had striven to injure, brought the Essene's temper up to a climacteric point. But he felt Lydia's presence, pacific, temperate and persuasive, restraining him. Of all the many deceits he had used throughout his precarious life of late, none seemed so impossible of practice as to offer a dispassionate word to Classicus.
He was saved for the moment by an exclamation from the alabarch.
"In all truth, that manifestation of Cæsar's favor?" he cried eagerly.
"A truth!" Agrippa declared. "Rome made a dandy out of Marsyas. Twelve legionaries, before he would stir a step to Egypt! Twelve! All armed; brasses so polished that one looks into the sun who looks at one. None short of three cubits in stature and visaged like Mars!"
Marsyas cut off the prince's raillery with a direct and serious query.
"How is it with our lady?"
"Still in hiding from Flaccus," the alabarch replied.
Agrippa looked in astonishment from one to another.
"Surely," he said earnestly, "you have not carried this delusion to such an extreme!"
"Delusion, lord," Marsyas repeated, facing him. "Let those first speak who are not deluded. Then thou shall apply the word to him it fits."