"He was," I replied curtly, "but he has left it."
"I certainly am disappointed," he said, seating himself by me, uninvited.
"I particularly wanted to speak to Capito at once."
"You might find him at his house," I suggested.
But Bambilio was impervious to suggestions.
"I wanted to talk to him and you together," he said, "but that can be managed some other time."
I was about to reply tartly, but I remembered how my irritation with Capito had affected me and recalled Galen's injunction that I must avoid all causes of excitement and emotion. I held my peace.
Bambilio, as if he had been an intimate and had been specially invited, lolled comfortably on the bench and gazed approvingly about.
"Fine garden, Andivius," he said. "Fine trees, fine flowers and I say, what a jewel of a slave-girl, eh! Hedulio!"
I could have hit him, I was so incensed at his familiarity, I was already choking with internal rage at Agathemer for having let anyone in to talk to me in that garden, still more at his having done so without consulting me and most of all that after doing so he had not made sure that no one but Capito could pass the postern door. But I almost exploded into voluble wrath when I looked where he indicated, saw a pretty, shapely young woman in the scanty attire of a slave-girl picking flag-flowers into a basket she carried, and recognized Vedia. That Agathemer's presumption should have spoiled the interview with Vedia which she and Nemestronia had manifestly arranged for us, that it should have exposed Vedia in her undignified disguise to recognition by the greatest ass and blatherskite in the senate, this infuriated me till I felt internally like Aetna or Vesuvius on the verge of eruption.
Vedia, for it was she, had evidently been approaching me circuitously, hoping to be noticed and hailed from afar. Now when she was near enough for not merely a lover but for any acquaintance to recognize her, she looked up at me over her basket as she laid a flower-stalk in it.