none to enjoy them all,
save a dying man and a fair-faced fool?" His thin lips tightened. The
seed Eudemius had planted was springing to lusty growth. "And they are
mine, all mine, for the taking. By the soul of my mother, I will take
them! I shall give feasts here such as Lucullus might have envied; I can
win what legion and what station I will; whatever fields Rome hath left
unconquered, I shall conquer for her. From the field I can reach the
forum, with a name which without wealth I could never gain. The times
are changing; it is time that men changed with them."

The words died upon his lips. He had reached a glass door, leading into
the small room formed by the angle of the north and east galleries which
flanked the court. This room, screened like the gallery, by glass walls
from the outer air, was filled with plants, answering in some sort to a
conservatory. Such rooms, used for different purposes and varied as to
furnishing, were at all the angles of the galleries. Marius, looking
through the half-open door, thought that the place seemed unfamiliar,
and began to fear he had taken the wrong way. Yet he had followed
closely the directions of Eudemius. He was about to turn back when his
eye fell on some one asleep close by the window which overlooked the
court.

"My lady herself, in very fact. This will be the second time I have
waked her. Without doubt, Fate hath willed it so. What may she be doing
here at this hour, without her women? Watched to see some one enter the
court, perhaps, and dropped asleep. To see whom? Did she know, by
chance, that I must pass this way from her father's rooms?"

He opened the door softly and entered. But the slight noise aroused
Varia. She sat up, rubbing her eyes.

"Is it not late for such solitary communing, sweet friend?" Marius
asked, approaching. He saw that she was in a plain robe of sheerest
white, ungirdled; that her hair fell loose, undecked with jewels, that
her feet were bare. "Perhaps you wait for some one?"

She sat on the edge of the couch, her hands clasped in her lap,
betraying no smallest consciousness of the unconventionality of her
appearance. Her white feet against the deep crimson of the rug held his
eyes.

"Oh, no!" she said sweetly. "Besides, if I did, should I tell you?"

He found himself again in the attitude of treating her as a child; felt
again his baffled perplexity at her glance, veiled and sidelong, which
was not a child's glance.

He bent tow