“You will? You will take me? You will never leave me, you will warn, support me and protect me?”
“Till my last day, till death, as my child, as the apple of my eye, as—dare I say it and believe it?—as my love, my second self, my wife.”
“Oh! Pontius, Pontius,” she exclaimed, grasping his broad, right hand in both her own. “This hour restores to the orphaned Balbilla, father and mother and gives her besides the husband that she loves.”
“Mine, mine!” cried the architect. “Immortal gods! During half a lifetime I have never found time, in the midst of labor and fatigue, to indulge in the joys of love and now you give me with interest and compound interest the treasure you have so long withheld.”
“How can you, a reasonable man, so over-estimate the value of your possession? But you shall find some good in it. Life can no longer be conceived of as worth having without the possessor.”
“And to me it has so long seemed empty and cold without you, you strange, unique, incomparable creature.”
“But why did you not come sooner, and so give me no time to behave like a fool?”
“Because, because,” said Pontius, gravely, “such a flight towards the sun seemed to me too bold; because I remember that my father’s father—”
“He was the noblest man that the ancestor of my house attracted to its greatness.”
“He was—consider it duly at this moment—he was your grandfather’s slave.”