Heraklas marked how the captive was represented to bend beneath the table's weight.

The boy's eyes grew fierce.

Captivity seemed a cruel thing, since Timokles had gone into it.
Heraklas flung himself on a seat covered by a leopard's skin, and gazed moodily upward at the palm-leaves, one or two of which stirred faintly under the slight wind that came from a corridor, whither the wooden wind-sails,--sloping boards commonly fixed over the terraces of the upper portions of Egyptian houses,--had conducted the current of air.
Borne from the streets of Alexandria, there seemed to Heraklas to come certain new, half-heard noises.

He listened, yet nothing definite reached his ears.
At length, seeing through a range of pillars a slave moving in the distance, Heraklas summoned the man, and asked what was the cause of the faintly-heard sounds.
"The people destroy the possessions of some of the Christians," humbly replied the slave, whose name was Athribis; and Heraklas, stung to the quick by the answer, impatiently motioned the man away.
Left alone, Heraklas lifted his head proudly.

He would ignore the pain.