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Updated: May 13, 2025
Flavia had summoned her father to show him a new costume which had just been sent home by Van Klopen, and which pleased her greatly. Flavia's costume was a masterpiece of fashionable bad taste, which makes women look all alike and destroys all appearance of individuality. It was a mass of frills, furbelows, fringes, and flutings of rare hue and form, making a series of wonderful contrasts.
The crowd, now far away, seemed to mock him for the uselessness of his sacrifice; Dea Flavia's sobs of sorely wounded love called to him to turn back. But memory now would be held back no longer.
How nip in the bud that nascent sympathy, that feeling for him which Flavia's outbreak the night before had suggested? Or how, short of all this, was he to face either Payton or the Colonel? Again a volley of oaths flew from him. In council with James McMurrough he might have arranged a plan of action; at least, he would have learned from him what Payton knew. But James's absence ruined all.
However, as San Giacinto was now a leading authority on questions of landed property in the city, it struck him that he could pretend a desire to see Flavia's husband, and make that an excuse for staying a long time, if necessary, in order to wait for him. He found Flavia and Spicca alone together, with a small tea-table between them.
The praetor had just returned, having seen Malchus and the officers lodged in prison, while the men were set to work on the fortifications. Sempronius stated Flavia's request. The praetor looked doubtful. "I had intended," he said, "to have kept the officers in prison until the senate decided what should be done with them; but, of course, if Flavia has set her mind on it I must strain a point.
He signalled to one of the lictors below an accomplice too, I imagine, in this transaction and whilst a chorus of obsequious greetings round Dea Flavia's litter filled the noonday air like the hum of bees, a pale-faced, delicate-looking girl was quickly pushed up on to the platform. Hun Rhavas very perfunctorily declaimed her age and status.
After a while Caligula paused in his walk and stood close beside her, looking as straight as he could into her pale face. "No thought of marriage?" he repeated, with one of his mirthless laughs, "no thought, mayhap, of the husband whom I would choose for thee? No doubt there is even now lurking somewhere in this palace a young gallant who alone has the right to aspire to Dea Flavia's grace."
One of Dea Flavia's gigantic Ethiopians had seized Menecreta by the shoulder, another pulled her head back by the hair and struck her roughly on the mouth, but she, with the strength of the vanquished, brought down to her knees, frenzied with despair, continued her agonised cry: "A curse upon thee, Dea Flavia, a curse spoken by the dying lips of the mother whom thou hast scorned!"
She stopped, finding herself in the impossible position of attempting to explain Hamilton to his wife; a task which, if once begun, would necessitate an entire course of enlightenment which she doubted Flavia's ability to receive, and which she could offer only with very poor grace. How can he fail to see the value of such friendships on the children's account, if for nothing else!
Whether Flavia's high spirit and her husband's gravity, her youth and his experience travelled the road together in unbroken amity, or with no more than the jars which the accidents of life occasion, however close the link, it does not fall within this story to tell. Nor need we say whether Father O'Hara proved as discreet in the long run as he had been liberal in the beginning.
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