t wed! I, too, would
know what joy and fulness a woman's life may hold, and perhaps I am not
too much fool to understand. But one cannot teach me from whom I shrink
with every breath I draw. These things I cannot understand. When I would
think and question, there is something just beyond me, which I cannot
grasp,--" she raised a hand, groping,--"something which escapes me, and
when I think I have it, lo! it vanishes, and I wander in the dark. Birds
I can understand, and trees, and little flowers, and clouds, and
sunlight, and rippling brooks; but men and women I cannot understand;
they all are strange to me, and I do not at all know why. I fear them; I
am restless and unhappy. One only in all the world have I seen who was
not strange. Him I could understand; when he spoke, all my heart sang in
answer; it was what I longed to say and could not, and I do not at all
know why. There was that in him which was in me, and yet I am fool and
he is not, and this also I cannot understand. Will it ever be that I
shall understand, O Nerissa?"

Nerissa sat on the couch beside her and drew her into her arms.

"Some day, surely, my pet," she soothed. "Think of it no more--never
fret thyself with foolish fancies. Now it groweth late and is time to
sleep. Thou shalt be my baby once again, for this night is the last I
shall have thee all mine own."

She called slave women, and had them pack away the scattered silks and
gauzes in the chests from which they had been taken, and make all ready
for the night. Thereafter she sent them all away, even the body-slaves
and tire-women, and herself waited upon her mistress. She freed Varia's
hair from the jewelled pins which held it, combed its dusky length, and
braided it in two long braids. She brought water in a great brazen jar,
and filled the sunken marble bath in the red-tiled bathroom, and bathed
her lady with scented soaps and perfumes. She cradled her in her arms,
wrapped in warm rugs, and rocked and crooned old slumber songs as though
her charge had been in fact a child again.

The lamps burned low, the room was warm and still. Varia, nestled in the
arms that had been to her a mother's arms, stirred drowsily once or
twice, and each time Nerissa bent over her, and felt her feet beneath
the rugs to see that they were warm, studying with tender care the soft
outline of rounded cheek, the long lashes down-dropped to hide the
starry eyes, the quiet rise and fall of breath.

"She is but a ch