‘Junia,’ he exclaimed, ‘you are a Christian; so am I’—and he marked on the gravel the monogram of Christ.
‘Alas!’ she answered, ‘a Christian you cannot be. It seems that you have heard of Jesus; but Christians cannot steal, and cannot live as you have been living. Christians are innocent.’
‘Then you will betray me? Ah! but if you do, you are in my power. Christianity is a foreign superstition. The City Prætor—’
‘Base,’ she answered, ‘and baser than I thought. Know you not’—and a light came into her eye, and a glow over all her face—‘that a Christian can suffer? that even a Christian slave-girl does not fear at all to die?’
He thought that she had never looked so beautiful—so like one of the angels of whom he had heard in the gatherings at Colossæ. But the sight of the gladiators hacking each other to pieces had inured him to cruelty and blood—had filled him with fierce egotism, and indifference to human life. A horrible thought suddenly leapt upon him as with a tiger’s leap. Why not get rid of the sole witness of his crime?
‘Then you will betray me to chains, to branding, to the scourge, to the cross?’ he asked, fiercely.
Weeping, hiding her face in her hands, she said: ‘What duty tells me, I must do. I must tell my father.’
In an instant the devil had Onesimus in his grip. He thrust his right hand into his bosom, where he had purposely concealed a dagger.
‘Then die!’ he exclaimed, seizing her with his left hand, while the steel gleamed in the sun.
The girl moved not; but his own shriek startled the air, as he felt a hand come down on his shoulder with the grasp of a vice. The dagger was wrenched out of his hand; he was whirled round, the blow of a powerful fist stretched him on the path, and a foot which seemed as if it would crush out his life was placed upon his breast.