"Until it is so allowed, and so practised too, the earth will resemble Tartarus rather than the Elysian Fields," said Aglais with energy.
Benigna began to cry amid her sympathetic audience, and said,
"It was so like the Elysian Fi-fields yesterday, and now it is like Tar-tartarus! They will kill him."
"For supper, do you mean?" asked Paulus, laying his powerful, white, long-fingered hand upon Benigna's head, while Agatha embraced her. "But then, how will they cook him? How ought a Claudius to be cooked?"
The young girl looked up wistfully through her tears, and said,
"You do not know that awful divine man."
"I think I half suspect him," answered Paulus. "But the red-faced, big, divine beast, as you call him, will reward Claudius, instead of being angry with him, and this I will show you clearly. Was it not a proof both of zeal and of prudence, on Claudius's part, in the service of his master, to endeavor to enlist your assistance? And again, upon finding, contrary to all likelihood—as Tiberius himself will admit, and would be the first to contend—that you preferred virtue, and truth, and honor, and good faith, to your own manifest and immediate interests, and to success in love—upon finding this extraordinary and unlikely fact occurring, was it not clearly the duty of Claudius to his master to hasten away at once and tell him the precise turn which events had taken? Now, what else has been his conduct, young damsel? What, except exactly all this, has Claudius done? Will he not, then, be rewarded by his master, instead of being eaten for supper?"
"Ah noble sir!" cried Benigna with clasped hands, "what wisdom and what beautiful language the gods have given you! This must be what people call Greek philosophy, expounded with Attic taste."
CHAPTER XIII.
Next morning at breakfast, Paulus announced that he had resolved to go to Formiæ and seek an audience of the emperor himself.