'She had nearly fallen the prey of one of the common soldiers,' he continued; 'but I, with a few pieces of gold, rescued her from him, picturing to myself the gratification you would feel at being so fitly attended. And that you might the better appreciate the gift, I have retained her till to-day before showing her to you, in order that you might first see her recovered from the toil of travel and in all her recovered beauty. A rare beauty, indeed, but of a kind so different from thine that your own will be heightened by the contrast rather than diminished. How many sestertia I have been offered for her, how many high officers of my forces have desired to obtain her for service upon their own wives, I cannot now remember. But I have refused and resisted all, for I would that you should be known throughout all Rome by the beauty of those in waiting about you, even as you are now known by your own beauty. Pray, accept of her, therefore, as your attendant and companion, for it would sorely disappoint me were you to reject such a pleasing gift.'
'Let it be as my lord says,' responded Ænone. 'And if I fail in due utterance of my thanks, impute it not to want of appreciation of the gift, but rather to inability of proper expression.'
It was with real gratitude that Ænone spoke; for, at the instant, a thought of cheering import flashed upon her, swelling her heart with joy, and causing her to welcome the captive girl as a gift from the gods. Here, perhaps, as though in direct answer to her prayer for sympathy, might be the one for whom her heart had been longing; coming to her, not laden with any of that haughty pride and ill-befitting knowledge with which the Roman world about her reeked, but rather as she herself had once come—with all her unstained provincial innocence of thought yet nestling in her shrinking soul—one, like herself, an exile from a lowly state, and with a heart filled with those simple memories which must not be too carelessly exposed—so seldom do they gather from without anything but cruel ridicule or cold lack of comprehension—one whom she could educate into an easy intimacy with her own impulses and yearnings, and thus, forgetting all social differences, draw closer and nearer to her as a friend and confidant.
As she thus reflected, she felt the soft pressure of lips upon her left hand, which hung idly at her side, and, looking down, she saw that the captive girl had knelt before her, and, while lightly grasping her fingers, was gazing up into her face with a pleading glance. Ænone's first impulse was to respond with eager warmth to that humble appeal for protection and friendship; and had it not been for the morbid fear she felt lest her husband, who stood looking on, might chide such familiarity, or at the least might cast ridicule upon the feeling which prompted it, she would have raised the captive girl and folded her in her arms. As it was, the impulse was too spontaneous and sudden to be entirely resisted, and she held forth her other hand to lift the kneeling figure, when a strange, intuitive perception of something which she could scarcely explain, caused her to withhold further action.
Something, she knew not what, in the attitude and expression of the captive before her, which sent her warm blood flowing back with a chilled current—something which told her that her hopes of the moment had been smitten with decay as suddenly as they had been raised, and that, instead of a friend, she had perhaps found an enemy. The full dark eye yet gazed up at her with the same apparent moistened appeal for friendly sympathy; but to Ænone's alarmed instinct it now seemed as though behind that glance there was an inner depth of cold, calculating scrutiny. Still, almost unheeding the gentle gesture of the hand extended to raise her, the Greek knelt upon the floor, and, with an appearance of mingled timorousness and humility, laid her lips upon the gathered fingers; but now there appeared to be no natural warmth or glow in the pressure or real savor of lowliness in the attitude, but rather a forced and studied obsequiousness. For the instant Ænone paused, as though uncertain how to act. Then, fearing to betray her doubts, and hoping that her startled instinct might have deceived her, she bent forward once more and raised the captive to her feet.
It had all been the work of an instant; passing so quickly that the pause between the impulse and its completion could hardly have been noticed. But in that instant a change had swept over the expressions of both; and as they now stood opposite and gazed more intently upon each other, the change still progressed. The face of the young Roman matron, but a moment before so glowing with sympathy and radiant with a new-discovered hope of future happiness, now seemed to shrink behind a veil of despairing dread—the fear chasing away the joy as the shadow flits along the wall and banishes the sunlight; while, though every feature of the Greek still seemed clothed with trembling humility, yet, from some latent depths of her nature, a gleam of something strangely wild and forbidding began to play upon the surface, and invest the moistened eye and quivering lip with an undefinable repulsive harshness.
'Your name?' said Ænone, rousing herself with exertion, as though from a painful dream.
'Leta, my lady,' was the reply, uttered in a tone of despairing sadness, and with eyes again cast upon the floor.
'Leta,' repeated Ænone, touched in spite of her forebodings by that guise of an unhappiness which might, after all, be real. 'It is a fair-sounding name, and I shall call you always by it. Poor girl! you are an exile from your native land, and I—I cannot call myself a Roman. We must be friends—must we not?'
She spoke rather in the tone of one hoping against evil auguries than as one indulging in any confident anticipations of the future. The Greek did not answer, but again slowly raised her eyes. At first, as before, with the same studied expression of pleading humility; but, as she glanced forward, and saw Sergius standing behind, and gazing at her with an admiration which he did not attempt to dissemble, a strange glow of triumph and ambitious hope seemed to light up her features. And when, after a hasty glance of almost responsive meaning toward Sergius, she again looked into the face of the other, it was no longer with an assumption of humble entreaty, but rather with an expression of wild, searching intensity. Before it the milder gaze of Ænone faltered, until it seemed as though the two had suffered a relative interchange of position: the patrician mistress standing with troubled features, and with vague apprehension and trembling in her heart, and as though timorously asking for the friendship which she had meant to bestow; and the captive, calmly, and with a look of ill-suppressed triumph, reading the other's soul as though to learn how she could most readily wield supremacy over her.