“Not two weeks hence, my lady?”
“Ay, Aldo.”
“Spartans must have been thine ancestors, Aldo. Thou wert a true hero to have kept silence under torture. ’Twas that silence, brave lad, that gives us our present happiness. I will not only make thee free, but I share with thee my winnings of this day!”
“Nay, my master; I wish for nothing. I am content if I may live with thee.”
“Come, dear heart,” says Gyges, taking Psyche’s hand, “let us sit together in our favorite place in the peristyle and watch the play of the fountain as the evening dies away.”
Seated on the same stone bench where they passed their happy afternoon before Psyche’s arrest, the loving couple lose themselves in meditation. The fountain plays its old joyful air.
“The months we were separated, O sweet wife, were bitter ones; but now in happy matrimonial bonds we live a new life of peace.”
“True, O Gyges; it seems as if my mind had been meanwhile in dense obscurity. Often does my memory revert to the sufferer with whom I passed the last months of my imprisonment.”
“Ay, tyranny did not end with the death of Sejanus,” replies Gyges.
“Ah, she was a living Niobe. Never shall I forget her expression when I told her that Drusus had been starved to death—O poor, poor Agrippina!” she exclaims, her eyes filling with tears. “But we are now happy,” she adds after a pause. “My life in our new home is a continuous song of joy.”