"Right welcome, after your successful quest. You have skilfully performed a difficult task. The Empress is greatly gratified, and you may count your fortune as good as made."
"Your Excellency is too kind," replied the Greek, with a graceful salutation; "I feel that I do not deserve your praise."
"Your modesty, my friend," remarked Adauctus with a smile, "shall not prevent your promotion, It is too rare a gift not to be encouraged."
"I have come, your Excellency," said Isidorus, with some degree of trepidation, "upon a business that nearly concerns yourself, and some to whom you wish well."
"It is very good of you," Adauctus calmly replied, "but I do not think you can give me any information that I do not already possess."
"I am in duty bound," continued the Greek, "to reveal to your Excellency, what is a secret which is sedulously kept from your knowledge. You have enemies who have vowed your destruction—the Princess Fausta, Furca, the arch-priest of Cybele, and the Prefect Naso. They menace also the Empresses Prisca and Valeria, and others in high places suspected of Christianity."
"Is that all you can tell me?" asked Adauctus, with a smile. "Look you," and unlocking an ivory cabinet, he took out a wax-covered tablet on which were inscribed the names of several other conspirators against his life, with the particulars of their plots.
"I have not sought one of these disclosures," he went on, "yet they have come to me from trustworthy sources; sometimes from men who are themselves Pagan, yet with honest souls that recoil from treachery and murder."
"And you know all this and remain thus calm!" exclaimed the Greek in amazement.
"With such a sword of Damocles hanging over my head, I am sure I could neither eat nor sleep."