To-day the prisoners—two hundred in all—crowded the floor, the stairs, even the deep gallery above; but on the south side, facing the staircase, two heavy curtains had been looped back from the atrium, and there a ray of wintry sunshine fell through the glass roof upon the famous Bayfield pavement and the figure of Narcissus gravely expounding it.
He had reached his peroration, and Dorothea, who knew every word of it by heart, was on the alert. At its close the audience held their breath for a second or two and then—satisfied, as their hostess rose, that he had really come to an end—tendered their applause, and, breaking into promiscuous chatter, trooped towards the tea-room. Narcissus lingered, with bent head, oblivious, silently repeating the last well- worn sentences while he conned his beloved tessellae.
A voice aroused him from his brown study; he looked up, to find the hall deserted and M. Raoul standing at his elbow.
"Will you remember your promise, Monsieur, and allow me to examine a little more closely? Ah, but it is wonderful! That Pentheus! And the Maenad there, carrying the torn limb! Also the border of vine-leaves and crossed thyrsi; though that, to be sure, is usual enough. And this next? Ah, I remember—'Tu cum parentis regna per arduum'; but what a devil of a design! And, above all, what mellowness! You will, I know, pardon the enthusiasm of one who comes from the Provence, a few miles out of Arles, and whose mother's family boasts itself to be descended from Roman colonists."
Narcissus beamed.
"To you then, M. Raoul, after your Forum and famous Amphitheatre, our pavement must seem a poor trifle—though it by no means exhausts our list of interesting remains. The praefurnium, for instance; I must show you our praefurnium."
"The house would be remarkable anywhere—even in my own Provence—so closely has it kept the original lines. In half-an-hour one could reconstruct—"
"Ay!" chimed in the delighted Narcissus. "You shall try, M. Raoul, you shall try! I promise to catch you tripping."
"Yonder runs the Fosse Way, west by south. The villa stands about two hundred yards back from it, facing the south-east—"
"A little east of south. The outer walls did not run exactly true with the enclosed quadrangle."