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How can it comfort a man in love to throw away a splendid career, abandon a great income and vanish from the ken of all who love him? What madness is this with which the gods afflict him? Oh, I could tear my hair with rage!" To trace Almo everything was done that could be done. Vocco himself set out at once for Hippo.
Therefore, with Brinnaria's knowledge and at her expense, Vocco had arranged to have an unremitting watch kept on Almo by skillful hirelings of the Imperial information department. These men sent messages whenever it was possible, and their reports were consistently favorable.
The transit to Italy at Messina was a sort of ferry. Italy was served by a network of roads always busy. Almo's letters to Flexinna were fairly regular and Vocco heard frequently from his friends among Almo's brother officers and sometimes from his military superiors.
It also left her enormously rich, one of the wealthiest women in Rome. Not a tenth so wealthy, but still very rich, it left Almo, Vocco and Flexinna, all of whom survived. As the plague had been rife, worse each year, for some seasons before the year of the great pestilence, so, ebbing yearly, it continued for some years after its acme.
While old-fashioned households, such as that of Vocco and Flexinna, clung to the antique Roman habit of lying down to meals on three rectangular dining-sofas placed on three sides of a square-topped table, this arrangement had long been supplanted at Court by a newer invention.
Savoring her glass of Vocco's exquisite Setian wine she asked: "What has gone wrong, Quintus?" "Just precisely what we feared has happened," Vocco replied. "In spite of all our efforts Hostidius appears to have known nothing whatever about Almo's peculiar past or of the special instructions Aurelius gave Opstorius. "Almo has practically repeated the vagary he perpetrated at Hippo.
At every piece of bad news I need a bracer." After she had emptied her glass, she burst out: "If Almo is acting as villicus of an estate near Fregellae he must be living with some slave-woman or other." "He is not," Vocco informed her. "I made careful inquiries on just that point and got my information from two different sources.
Grittonius yielded. The necessary papers were drawn up, all the depositions were made out in duplicate. Every formality was fulfilled and Almo was publicly sold as a slave in the market place of Hippo." "What company did he enter?" Brinnaria queried. "Veppius did not state," Vocco replied; "he merely said that Almo sailed the next day for Spain." "The fool!" Brinnaria cried.
Their influx sent up the price of large residences and caused much activity in the renting and selling of properties suitable for the homes of people of ample means. Brinnaria, without a male relation of even the remotest degree, came to lean more and more on Vocco, the husband of her chum Flexinna.
When Vocco expressed astonishment Olynthides said: "There is nothing to be surprised at, the thing happens every day. It is a regular feature of slave-trading. There are all sorts of reasons why a man wants a slave without any past. Such sales are customary and habitual."
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