Through the remaining hours of that day and all that night Psyche never left her mistress. The next morning the dancing-girl was cruelly forced to leave Pandataria and go to Rome.
Two days later, the long tragedy was ended. The heroic sufferer had gained her point and had starved herself to death. Her tragic sorrows were over and her triumph had come. She had conquered the emperor.
Chapter XXIII
IN the peristyle of a small house not far from the Porta Capena, a little woman sings a happy song as she tends and gathers her flowers. A fountain adds its liquid sound to her pleasing melody. It is near sundown, and the peristyle is bathed in soft light reflected from a clear blue sky. In a corner of the corridor that surrounds the peristyle, a bright-faced lad lies upon a couch. A hunchbacked girl with long arms and slanting but kind face hands him a cup of water and moves silently away. The little woman takes a tuft of mignonette and gives it to the happy-faced lad, saying, “That will refresh thee after thy tired and anxious day.”
“Thou art too kind, my lady.”
“Do thy limbs pain thee less, Aldo?”
“Ay, my lady,” replies the lad, anxious to appear better and stronger than he really is.
“Cruelly did they torture thee, my Aldo.”
“Ay; they were brutal. But they learned not from me my master’s hiding-place.”
“Brave and heroic lad, thy silence saved us all.”