CHAPTER IX
"—AS AN ARMY WITH BANNERS!"
Agrippa emerged at sunset from his apartment and descended to the first floor of the alabarch's mansion. The hall was vacant and each of the chambers opening off it was silent, so he wandered through the whole length of the corridor, composedly as a master in his own house. No one did he see until he reached the end of the hall, when there appeared suddenly, as if materialized out of the gloom, the brown serving-woman. The olive-green of her immense eyes glittered in the light of a reed taper she bore. She stepped aside to let him pass and proceeded to light the lamps.
Agrippa stopped to look at her, simply because she was lithe and unusual, but she continued without heeding him. On one of the lamp-bowls the palm-oil had run over and the reed ignited it; but with her bare hand the woman damped it and went her way with a running flame flickering out on the back of her hand.
"Perpol!" the prince exclaimed to himself as he rambled on. "No wonder the phenix comes to Egypt to be born."
At the end of a corridor he passed through an open door into a colonnade fronting a court-garden of extraordinary beauty. It was carpeted with sod, interlined with walks of white stone which led at every divergence to a classic Roman exedra. The awning which usually sheltered the inclosure from the sun had been rolled up and the cooling sky bent loftily over it. The inert summer airs were heavy with the scent of lotus, red lilies and spice roses which were massed in an oval bed in the center.
At that moment he caught sight of an indolent figure, half sitting, half lying in one of the sections of the exedra.
He knew at first glance that it was not the alabarch's daughter, and, remembering that his last glance in the mirror after his servant had done with him had shown him at his best, he moved without hesitation toward the unknown.
As he approached she raised her eyes and coolly scrutinized him. Her face, thus lifted for inspection, showed him a woman in the later twenties, and of that type which since the beginning could look men between the eyes. She was a Roman, but never in all the Empire were other eyes so black and luminous, or hair so glossy, or cheek so radiant. Her face was an elongated oval, topping a long round neck, which broadened at the base into a sudden and exaggerated slope of marble-white shoulders. The low sweep of the bosom, the girdle just beneath it, shortening the lithe waist, the slender hips, the long lazy limbs completed a perfect type, distinct and unlimited in its powers.
For a fraction of a second the two contemplated each other; perhaps only long enough for each to confess to himself that he had met his like. Then Agrippa came and sat down beside her, and she did not stir from her careless posture. So many, many of the kind had each met and known that they could not be strangers.