"Now am I not so sure of that!" said Varia, and her voice changed and was strange. "Oh, Nerissa, it is not that I would not wed! I, too, would know what joy and fulness a woman's life may hold, and perhaps I am not too much fool to understand. But one cannot teach me from whom I shrink with every breath I draw. These things I cannot understand. When I would think and question, there is something just beyond me, which I cannot grasp,—" she raised a hand, groping,—"something which escapes me, and when I think I have it, lo! it vanishes, and I wander in the dark. Birds I can understand, and trees, and little flowers, and clouds, and sunlight, and rippling brooks; but men and women I cannot understand; they all are strange to me, and I do not at all know why. I fear them; I am restless and unhappy. One only in all the world have I seen who was not strange. Him I could understand; when he spoke, all my heart sang in answer; it was what I longed to say and could not, and I do not at all know why. There was that in him which was in me, and yet I am fool and he is not, and this also I cannot understand. Will it ever be that I shall understand, O Nerissa?"
Nerissa sat on the couch beside her and drew her into her arms.
"Some day, surely, my pet," she soothed. "Think of it no more—never fret thyself with foolish fancies. Now it groweth late and is time to sleep. Thou shalt be my baby once again, for this night is the last I shall have thee all mine own."
She called slave women, and had them pack away the scattered silks and gauzes in the chests from which they had been taken, and make all ready for the night. Thereafter she sent them all away, even the body-slaves and tire-women, and herself waited upon her mistress. She freed Varia's hair from the jewelled pins which held it, combed its dusky length, and braided it in two long braids. She brought water in a great brazen jar, and filled the sunken marble bath in the red-tiled bathroom, and bathed her lady with scented soaps and perfumes. She cradled her in her arms, wrapped in warm rugs, and rocked and crooned old slumber songs as though her charge had been in fact a child again.
The lamps burned low, the room was warm and still. Varia, nestled in the arms that had been to her a mother's arms, stirred drowsily once or twice, and each time Nerissa bent over her, and felt her feet beneath the rugs to see that they were warm, studying with tender care the soft outline of rounded cheek, the long lashes down-dropped to hide the starry eyes, the quiet rise and fall of breath.
"She is but a child! She will forget!" she murmured.
But Varia spoke, in a voice straight from the land of dreams, opening upon her eyes misty with sleep.
"One does not forget!" she said drowsily. "One loses a thing, for a long time, it may be, but some shadow of that thing is always left, even to a fool. Is it not so?"
"Ay, if thou sayest," said Nerissa, as readily as she would have agreed that pigs were butterflies if her lady had willed them so. But Varia was asleep before she spoke.
All through that night Nerissa held her nursling in fond, anxious arms that knew no weariness, brooding over her as a mother with her child.