"From this door go to your left, until you come to the gallery which runs along the northern, not the southern, end of the large court. Go down this to your right, and you will reach your own apartments. Vale!"
Marius took his leave, wishing his host good rest. He strolled through halls on which looked numberless rooms, furnished richly, warm and silent, waiting for the guests who never came. Not a servant was in sight; the silence of midnight wrapped the place in slumber. Lamps, swinging from tall standards or from the ceilings, shed a mellow light around; his feet pressed rich woven rugs which hid the mosaic pavements beneath. Around him was a golden perfumed stillness. He went more slowly, steeping his senses in the aroma of luxury.
"How a man might welcome his friends to such a house as this!" he muttered. "I can see them here around me—Fabian, Julius, Volux, all the rest. Ye gods, how the walls would echo! Now it all lies fallow, its wealth unknown, its treasures unseen. It should be used—ay, used to the very top notch of its value. Where is the use of paintings, marbles, rugs, halls, gardens, wealth such as this, with none to enjoy them all, save a dying man and a fair-faced fool?" His thin lips tightened. The seed Eudemius had planted was springing to lusty growth. "And they are mine, all mine, for the taking. By the soul of my mother, I will take them! I shall give feasts here such as Lucullus might have envied; I can win what legion and what station I will; whatever fields Rome hath left unconquered, I shall conquer for her. From the field I can reach the forum, with a name which without wealth I could never gain. The times are changing; it is time that men changed with them."
The words died upon his lips. He had reached a glass door, leading into the small room formed by the angle of the north and east galleries which flanked the court. This room, screened like the gallery, by glass walls from the outer air, was filled with plants, answering in some sort to a conservatory. Such rooms, used for different purposes and varied as to furnishing, were at all the angles of the galleries. Marius, looking through the half-open door, thought that the place seemed unfamiliar, and began to fear he had taken the wrong way. Yet he had followed closely the directions of Eudemius. He was about to turn back when his eye fell on some one asleep close by the window which overlooked the court.
"My lady herself, in very fact. This will be the second time I have waked her. Without doubt, Fate hath willed it so. What may she be doing here at this hour, without her women? Watched to see some one enter the court, perhaps, and dropped asleep. To see whom? Did she know, by chance, that I must pass this way from her father's rooms?"
He opened the door softly and entered. But the slight noise aroused Varia. She sat up, rubbing her eyes.
"Is it not late for such solitary communing, sweet friend?" Marius asked, approaching. He saw that she was in a plain robe of sheerest white, ungirdled; that her hair fell loose, undecked with jewels, that her feet were bare. "Perhaps you wait for some one?"
She sat on the edge of the couch, her hands clasped in her lap, betraying no smallest consciousness of the unconventionality of her appearance. Her white feet against the deep crimson of the rug held his eyes.
"Oh, no!" she said sweetly. "Besides, if I did, should I tell you?"
He found himself again in the attitude of treating her as a child; felt again his baffled perplexity at her glance, veiled and sidelong, which was not a child's glance.