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As the lawyer and his children reclined at the triclinium in the cool arcade opening on the garden, Martius narrated to Virgilia his conversation with Hermione that morning in his father's office.
Little had he expected to hear Virgilia Jeffreys taxed with giggling. Yet giggling she was, with some emphasis and spirit too. She seemed to have slipped back from sedate and dignified young womanhood to mere flippant girlishness and not to have gained appreciably by the transition.
"Is it for a feast, Sahira?" asked Virgilia, looking at herself in the long metal mirror, and smiling at the reflection. Virgilia was human. "For a feast, your father said," replied the slave, leaving Virgilia in her splendor, sitting in the fast-darkening room, alone. The Senator Adrian Soderus, indeed, lost no time.
Preciosa paused for a moment's consideration. She was not sure that Virgilia knew her well enough to shake her, nor had she supposed that Virgilia was giddy enough to shake anybody.
She will forget this foolishness when she is surrounded by such luxury as he can give her. Send for him." "Where is Virgilia now?" "In her room, where I sent her to think over her sins and repent." Aurelius thought of the small, dark cubiculum where his daughter sat alone on this day when the floods descended, and his heart warmed to the culprit. "I will talk with Virgilia," he said, rising.
Not once, however, did the thought enter her mind that she was a free being, at liberty to rebel and decline this marriage so suddenly arranged for her. It was for her parents to decide what her future should be, and for her to obey. Early in the morning of the day which they were to pass in the lovely gardens of Octavia, Virgilia ascended a narrow steep staircase and went out upon the flat roof.
He must deal very gently with her. "Sit down here by me, dearest, I want to talk with thee a little." So Virgilia sat down on a little stool at her father's feet and leaned her arm on his knee, and while he stroked her soft hair, bound with fillets of chased gold, set with large turquoises, he strove to calm her and distract her mind from its vagaries.
Daffingdon and Virgilia were bidden to the Gibbons dinner, along with the rest. "It's a sop," declared Virgilia; "it's to propitiate us. It's to make amends he knows he hasn't treated us fairly. Shall we go?" "He has treated us no worse than he has treated everybody else," said Dill, bent upon the preservation of his amour propre.
Yet, if thou art once married to him, he is bound to protect thee. Thou wilt surely be safe." "But thou and Hermione and Marcus?" "God is all-powerful. We are in his hands." There came the messenger from the Lady Octavia bearing a pearl anklet as a wedding gift to Virgilia with many greetings and good wishes.
Glorified in the silvery whiteness of the moonlight, arose the splendid palaces of the Caesars. Virgilia could see them plainly if she lifted her eyes, for they stood high, on the Palatine Hill. There was revelry yonder. The notes of flutes and harps came faintly to her ears. Below, wound the Tiber, back and forth, like the coils of a huge, glistening serpent.
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