"You have won, mistress!" answered Delphine, kneeling down with the gilded sandals; "your colours, the blue, have beaten the green; both with the horses and the chariots!"
"What a triumph!" cried Theodora joyfully. "A bet of two centenaria of gold; it is mine! News? Whence? from Italy?" she cried to a slave who just entered with letters.
"Yes, mistress, from Florence; from the Gothic Princess, Gothelindis. I know the Gorgon-seal; and from Silverius, the archdeacon."
"Give me them," said Theodora, "I will take them with me to church. The mirror, Elpis."
A young slave came forward with an oval plate of brilliantly-polished silver, in a gold frame, richly set with pearls, and standing on a strong foot of ivory.
Poor Elpis had a hard service.
During the completion of the toilet she had to hold the heavy plate, and, following every movement of her restless mistress, turn it, so that the latter could always look at her own reflection, and woe to Elpis if she were too late in turning!
"What is there to buy, Zephyris?" the Empress asked a dark-skinned Lybian freed-woman, who just then brought her a tame snake to caress, which lay in a small basket upon soft moss.
"Oh, nothing particular," answered the Lybian. "Come, Glauke," she added, taking a snowy white chlamys, embroidered with gold, from a clothes-press, and carefully spreading it out upon her arms, waited until Glauke took it from her, and, at one throw, arranged it in graceful folds upon the shoulders of the Empress, clasping it with the white girdle, and fastening one end upon her pearly shoulder with a golden brooch, which, formed in the shape of the dove of Venus, now represented the sign of the Holy Ghost.
Glauke, the daughter of an Athenian sculptor, had studied the folds of the chlamys for years, and for this reason had been bought by the Empress at a cost of many thousand solidi. The whole day long this was her sole occupation.