"It is my grandsire's queen, Mariamne," he continued softly, for ordinary tones awakened ghostly echoes in the haunted hall.
"Murdered Mariamne!" the old man whispered with sudden intensity.
"He loved her, and killed her in the fury of his love. They said that the king was wont to come in the morning when the sun stood there, drive out the attendants so that none might hear, and cling about this fair marble's knees in such agony of passion and remorse and grief that life would desert him. They would come in time to find him there, stretched on the pavement, cold and inert, to all purposes dead! And it was said that these groins here above held echoes of his awful grief after he had been borne away."
Capito shivered.
"What punishment!" he exclaimed.
"Punishment! They who curse Herod's memory could not, if they had their will, visit such torture upon him as he invented for himself!"
But Capito was lost now in contemplation of the statue.
"She was beautiful," he said after a silence.
"Didst ever see her?" Agrippa asked eagerly. The collector's back was turned to the prince, that he might have the advantageous view, and he answered with rapt eyes.
"Once; through an open gate which led into her own garden. So I saw her in the lightest of vestments, for the day was warm and half of her beauty usually hidden was unveiled."