“Then I shall start for Rome,” said Verus decidedly. “My wife wants to be back with her children, and as praetor, it is more fitting that I should stay by the Tiber than by the Nile.”
The words were spoken as lightly as though they were nothing more than a proposition to go to supper, but they seemed to agitate the Empress deeply, for her head, which had seemed almost a fixture during her conversation with Titianus, now shook so violently that the pearls and jewels rattled in the erection of curls. There she sat for some seconds staring into her lap.
Verus stooped to pick up a gem that had fallen from her hair, and as he did so she said hastily:
“You are right. Apollonius is intolerable. Let us send him to meet my husband.”
“Then I will remain,” answered Verus, as pleased as a wilful boy who has got his own way.
“Fickle as the wind,” murmured Sabina, threatening him with her finger. “Show me the stone—it is one of the largest and finest; you may keep it.”
When an hour later, Verus quitted the hall with the prefect, Titianus said:
“You have done me a service cousin, without knowing it. Now can you contrive that Ptolemaeus and Favorinus shall go with Apollonius to meet the Emperor at Pelusium?”
“Nothing easier” was the answer.
And the same evening the prefect’s steward conveyed to Pontius the information that he might count on having probably fourteen days for his work, instead of eight or nine only.