"Stop!" he ordered his bearers.
The woman approached and made obeisance.
"Humph! Antonia," he muttered in some disappointment. But he drew his old frame together and inclined his head respectfully.
"Greeting, sister," he said. "The gods attend thee."
"Thou art good, Augustus. Welcome to Tusculum once more," she replied. She took the hand he extended and raised it to her lips. The old man gazed at her with a wavering eye.
"Come closer. Art so gray?" he asked.
"White, Cæsar."
He took the hand from hers and put back the vitta that covered her hair. There were the sorrows of seventy years, in its absolute whiteness, and the Roman duskiness of skin was brought out very strongly in contrast. But her eyes were still full and bright, even tender, her thin lips lacking nothing of the color of her youth. Age had not laid its withering touch on her stature or even on the fullness of her frame, but the hand, Time's infallible tally, was the worn-out hand of seventy years.
She was the noblest woman of her age, univira,—the widow of one husband, dead in her youth, the mother of statesmen, generals and emperors, a scholar and at one time a diplomat,—in all things, the ancient spirit of the First Republic, solitary, rugged, irreproachable in the vicious age of the Cæsars.
"Eh! White, wholly white," he assented, running his fingers through her locks with a movement that was almost tender. "And I am thine elder. Yet," he drew himself up and defiance hardened his face, "I am not a dead man, Antonia!"