Not the least care was visible on his face. The servants only knew that the feast would be something uncommon, for he had issued a command to give unusual rewards to those with whom he was satisfied, and some slight blows to all whose work should not please him, or who had deserved blame or punishment earlier. To the cithara players and the singers he had ordered beforehand liberal pay. At last, sitting in the garden under a beech, through whose leaves the sun-rays marked the earth with bright spots, he called Eunice.
She came, dressed in white, with a sprig of myrtle in her hair, beautiful as one of the Graces. He seated her at his side, and, touching her temple gently with his fingers, he gazed at her with that admiration with which a critic gazes at a statue from the chisel of a master.
“Eunice,” asked he, “dost thou know that thou art not a slave this long time?”
She raised to him her calm eyes, as blue as the sky, and denied with a motion of her head.
“I am thine always,” said she.
“But perhaps thou knowest not,” continued Petronius, “that the villa, and those slaves twining wreaths here, and all which is in the villa, with the fields and the herds, are thine henceforward.”
Eunice, when she heard this, drew away from him quickly, and asked in a voice filled with sudden fear,—
“Why dost thou tell me this?”
Then she approached again, and looked at him, blinking with amazement. After a while her face became as pale as linen. He smiled, and said only one word,—
“So!”