One spring night it was Mafia’s watch until midnight, at which time Brinnaria was to relieve her. It was the custom that, at the end of her watch, the Vestal on duty made sure that the fire was burning properly and then left it and herself waked her relief, it being entirely inconceivable that, under roof and protected all round by bronze lattices, a properly burning fire could go out in the brief space of time required to leave the temple, enter the court-yard, cross it, ascend the stairs and for the relieving Vestal to reach the temple by the same path reversed.
Brinnaria was a sound sleeper. She woke in the pitch dark with the instant conviction that she had slept long past midnight, with a sudden qualm of apprehension, of boding, almost of terror.
She was a methodical creature for all her wildness, and very neat in her habits. By touch, almost without groping, she dressed in the dark. Silently she slipped out of her room, noiselessly she closed the door, softly she groped her way to the stairs, down the stairs out into the courtyard to the corner of the colonnade.
There, a pace or two beyond the pillars, under the open sky, she peered up.
The gray light of dawn was faintly hinted in the blackish canopy of cloud above her.
Swiftly she flitted the length of the court, whisking past the dimly-seen columns; swiftly she traversed the three small rooms at its eastern end, panting she plunged through the dark doorway into the dark temple.
There was no flicker of fire-light on the carved and gilded panels of the lofty ceiling; the ceiling, in fact, was invisible, unguessable in the gloom.
There was no glow upon the altar, not even a glimmer of redness through the ashes.
Brinnaria held her hand over the ashes. Nowhere could she discern more than the merest hint of warmth.
On the back of her hands, as on the back of her neck, she could feel the chill of the faintly stirring dawn wind that breathed through the bronze lattices and across the temple interior.