I should not have been surprised if she had fainted and crumpled up on the white and brown mosaic floor in front of the counter. She kept her feet and her outward self-possession.
Clemens spoke to her in an undertone.
"No," she answered him, in a choked voice, "I have changed my mind. I won't take these."
She was handling an unsurpassable necklace of big pearls.
He whispered to her.
"No," she said, curtly. "I won't look at any others. I think I'll go home."
He was so amazed that he never saw me or, I think, anything or anybody else in that shop just then. He escorted her out.
When I regained my self-possession enough to feel that I appeared at ease and could trust myself to glance at the other customers as I should have done had I been in fact what I was trying to appear, I was relieved to find that not one of them was more than distantly known to me.
The idlers on the benches showed no inclination to rise and approach the counter. Falco and I occupied the interval vacated by Clemens and Vedia. Agathemer, of all men on earth, asked what he could do for us. Falco stood there a long time, saw a goodly fraction of the finest jewels in Orontides' possession and, manifestly, made as favorable impression of connoisseurship on Agathemer as Agathemer made on him. They eyed each other as fellow-adepts. Falco asked that he reserve an antique Babylonian seal cut in sardonyx and promised to send a messenger with its price before dark. Agathemer, who was passing under the name of Eucleides, blandly replied that Orontides would prefer to send the seal to Falco's residence. Falco agreed, of course, and to my unutterable relief we finally departed.
Agathemer—Eucleides—brought the seal; and timed his arrival neatly as Falco returned from the Baths of Titus just before dinner time. He was giving a big formal dinner and my dinner was to be served in my apartment, which had a tiny triclinium; being as lavishly appointed, and one in which I was as luxuriously lodged and served, as those I had had in Carthage and Utica.