"Yonder is Crispina's daughter, who is here in obedience to your letter."
Sejanus answered this reminder with a sour and peculiar smile.
"Good," said he; "she has come to announce the fine news to her betrothed. Let her tell him that he has only to break a horse for Tiberius Cæsar to obtain his freedom. I have no time to attend any more to slaves and their mates. She has now but to ask for Claudius at that palace. He has orders to expect her, and to receive from her mouth the pleasing information I have just given you."
Saying this, he walked away.
Our hero conceived some undefined misgiving from these words, or rather from the tone, perhaps, in which the prefect had uttered them. Unable to question the speaker, he slowly returned to poor little Benigna, and said, "Well, Benigna, I have ascertained what you have to do; and, first of all, Claudius expects you within."
As he spoke, he knocked at the door. This time only one leaf of it was opened, and a slave, standing in the aperture, and scanning Paulus and his companion, demanded their business; while the sentries on either hand at the sculptured pillars, or antæ of the porch, looked and listened superciliously.
"Is the secretary-slave Claudius here?" asked the youth.
Before the porter could reply, steps and voices resounded in the hall within, and the porter sprang out of the way, flinging almost into Paulus's face the other leaf of the door, and bowing low. Three gentlemen, two of whom apparently were half-drunk, their faces flushed, and their arms linked together, appeared staggering upon the threshold, where they stood awhile to steady themselves before emerging into the street.
"I tell you, my Pomponius Flaccus," said he who was in the middle—a portly man, with a good-natured, shrewd, tipsy look—"it is all a pretty contrivance, and there will be no slaughter, for the beast is to be muzzled."
"And I tell you, my Lucius Piso," returned he on the left, a wiry drinker, "my governor of Rome, my dedicatee of Horace—"