He was trying to suppress the mutiny of ‘the blushing shamefast spirit’ within him, as he thought of the games and the dice-box and the Subura, when he was thrilled through and through by a terrified and scarcely audible whisper of his name—
‘Onesimus!’
He turned round, and with nervous haste relocking the casket, hurried into the passage. There, with head bowed over her hands, he saw the figure of a young girl. For one instant she raised her face as he came out, and he exclaimed—‘Junia!’
She raised her hand with a warning gesture, put her finger to her lips, and vanished. She fled towards the garden behind the farthest precincts of the house, and he overtook her in a walk sheltered from view by a trellis covered with the leaves of a spreading vine.
‘Junia,’ he said, flinging himself on his knees, ‘will you betray me?’
The girl stood pale and trembling. ‘Onesimus,’ she said, ‘I conceal nothing from my father.’
‘From your father? Oh, Junia, he would drag me before Pudens. Would you see me beaten, perhaps to death, with the leaded thongs? Would you hear me shriek under the horrible scutica? Could you bear to see the crows tearing my flesh as I hung on the cross?’
‘Pudens is just and kind,’ she said, faintly, ‘he never inflicts upon his slaves such horrors as these.’
‘No,’ answered Onesimus, bitterly; ‘it would suffice to send me, chained, to work in some sunless pit to the music of clanking fetters. It would suffice to brand three letters on my forehead, and turn me into the world to starve as a spectacle of shame.’
‘Onesimus,’ she said, ‘would God I could—’ She stopped, confused and terrified, for she did not know that Onesimus had ever heard the truths of Christianity.