Two days passed, and Domitia remained undisturbed. No tidings reached her from Rome, but to her great relief the Cæsar Domitian did not appear. That a meeting with him must take place, she was aware, but in what manner he would address her, that she could not guess; whether he would take occasion to exhibit ignoble revenge for her treatment of him on the night when he sought refuge in her house, or whether he would approach her as a lover. This the sequel could alone disclose. The second alternative was what she mainly dreaded.
On the third day, hearing a bustle in the hall, and conjecturing that some one had arrived, and that the critical moment had come, Domitia waited in her chamber with beating heart, and long-drawn sighs. When the curtains were sharply withdrawn, to her surprise and delight her mother entered, radiant in her best toilette, her face, as far as could be judged through the paint, wreathed with smiles.
“Well!” said she.—“But first a seat. You sly fox! who would have thought it? But there—I am content. I have sent out no invitations to a little supper, there is now no occasion for it, and one does not care to spend—without an expectation of it leading to results. To look at your face no one would have supposed that depth in you—and to play us all such a trick, poor Lamia and me. It would really make a widow of a week old laugh. Don’t smother me, my dear, and above all, don’t cry—that is to say, if you cry do not let your tears fall on my cheek, you know I am—well—well—it might spoil my complexion.”
“Mother,” gasped the unhappy girl—“O, how can you speak to me in this manner. You know, you must know, I have been carried away against my will. O mother, Lucius does not suppose that——”
“My dear child, it does not concern me in the least, whether the kitten carried off the rat, or the rat the kitten. Here you are in the rat’s hole, and all you have to look to is to eat your rat and not let the rat eat you.”
“Oh, mother! mother! take me home with you.”
“Domitia, do not be a baby. Of course you cannot return. You have bidden farewell to the household Gods, and renounced the paternal threshold.”
“Mother—I have embraced the gate-posts of the Lamiæ.”
“But the Gods of that family have been unable or unwilling to retain you, they have resigned you to—I cannot say, in conscience, nobler hands, for the Flavian family—well, we know what we know,—but to more powerful hands, that will not let you go. Besides, my dear, I have no wish to have you home again. When a bird has flown, it has said farewell to the nest, to its cracked eggshells and worms, and must find another.”
“Do not be cruel!”