“Away with the Christians! to the lions let them go! Away with them from the face of the earth! Away with them!”
Hyacintha caught the cry, and there came back to her thoughts of the hill-side outside her native city, of the earnest, watching gaze of Ebba, and of the news of Alban’s death, which had been brought into the atrium by her father.
And it was the same here in Rome; the Christians must be killed; they must all be stamped out, like so many “lizards on a sunny wall,” as the man had said.
Death, then, was here—as everywhere—and was lying like a shadow over the sunlit Forum, with all its throngs of people, intent on business or pleasure.
The circular stalls of the bookseller and the scrolls of popular authors attracted Hyacintha.
Then there were the keen-eyed, sharp-featured money-lenders, seated at Medius Janus with their clerks around them. Here might be seen young Romans, who wasted life and substance in all the luxury and folly of the baths, trying to raise loans at an enormous rate of interest, some successful, departing with a jaunty air, their slaves following them; others gathering their robes about them and slinking off with a look of despair in their faces, to plunge deeper and deeper into the sea of self-indulgence and misery which it caused.
Clœlia drew Hyacintha onward, for she saw she attracted attention, and many bold dark eyes were turned towards her.
“We must hasten,” she said; “let us skirt the Forum to the left, where the crowd is less, and we shall reach the House of the Vestals.”
As they got into a quieter thoroughfare those who were passing gave way; then a body of lictors appeared, and a most stately, queenlike figure, clothed in a long stole, which reached to her feet, moved through the street, with two female attendants.
The lady’s eye fell upon Hyacintha, whose remarkable beauty was likely to arrest any one’s attention. By a little movement of the foot-passengers, Hyacintha was pushed out of the line of those who were standing aside, and a lictor roughly called to her to—