d eyes its defiant mastery, but a form again
bent low in timorous supplication, and features once more overspread
with a mingled imprint of sorrowful resignation, trusting devotion, and
pleading humility.

That gleam of malicious triumph which had so brightened up the face of
the slave, had come and gone like the lightning flash, and, for the
moment, AEnone was almost inclined to believe that it was some
bewildering waking dream. But her instinct told her that it was no mere
imagination or fancy which could thus, at one instant, fill the heart
with dread and change her bright anticipations of coming joy into a
dull, aching foreboding of misery. It was rather her inner nature
warning her not to be too easily ensnared, but to wait for coming evil
with unfaltering watchfulness, and, for the purpose of baffling enmity,
to perform the hardest task that can be imposed upon a guileless
nature--that of repressing all outward sign of distrust, hiding the
torture of the heart within, and meeting smile with smile.

But day after day passed on, and even to her watchful and strained
attention there appeared no further sign of anything that could excite
alarm. From morning until night there rested upon the face of the young
Greek slave no expression other than that of tender, faithful, and
pleased obedience. At the morning toilet, at the forenoon task of
embroidery, or at the afternoon promenade, there was ever the same
serene gaze of earnest devotion, and the same delighted alacrity to
anticipate the slightest wish. Until at last AEnone began again to think
that perhaps her perception of that one fleeting look might, after all,
be but a flickering dream. And when, at times, she sat and heard the
young girl speak, not with apparent method, but rather as one who is
unwittingly drawn into discursive prattle, about her cottage home in
Samos, and the lowly lover from whom the invading armies had torn her,
and watched the moistened eye and the trembling lip with which these
memories were dwelt upon, an inward pity and sympathy tempted her to
forget her own distrust; until one day she was impelled to act as she
had once desired, and began to pour out her whole heart to the young
slave as to a friend. The words seemed of themselves to flow to her
lips, as, bidding the girl be comforted, she told, in one short
sentence, how she too had once lived in a tranquil cottage home, away
from the bustle and fever of that imperial Rome, and had had h