, I love happy faces, and Revenge has a sinister
brow. Let us be happy, oh wife of Caesar! Tomorrow I shall have much to
tell you, now I must go to a splendid banquet which the son of Plutarch
is giving in my honor. I cannot stay with you--truly I cannot, I have
been expected long since. And when we are in Rome never let me find you
telling the children those old dismal stories--I will not have it."

As Verus, preceded by his slaves bearing torches, made his way through
the garden of the Caesareum he saw a light in the rooms of Balbilla, the
poetess, and he called up merrily:

"Good-night, fair Muse!"

"Good-night, sham Eros!" she retorted.

"You are decking yourself in borrowed feathers, Poetess," replied he,
laughing. "It is not you but the ill-mannered Alexandrians who invented
that name!"

"Oh! and other and better ones," cried she. "What I have heard and seen
to-day passes all belief!"

"And you will celebrate it in your poems?"

"Only some of it, and that in a satire which I propose to aim at you."

"I tremble!"

"With delight, it is to be hoped; my poem will embalm your memory for
posterity."

"That is true, and the more spiteful your verses, the more certainly will
future generations believe that Verus was the Phaon of Balbilla's Sappho,
and that love scorned filled the fair singer with bitterness."

"I thank you for the caution. To-day at any rate you are safe from my
verse, for I am tired to death."

"Did you venture into the streets?"

"It was quite safe, for I had a trustworthy escort."

"May I be allowed to ask who?"

"Why not? It was Pontius the architect who was with me."

"He knows the town well."

"And in his care I would trust myself to descend, like Orpheus, into
Hades."

"Happy Pontius!"

"Most happy Verus!"

"What am I to understand by those words, charming Balbilla?"

"The poor architect is able to please by being a good guide, while to you
belongs the whole heart of Lucilla, your sweet wife."

"And she has the whole of mine so far as it is not full of Balbilla.
Good-night, saucy Muse; sleep well."

"Sleep ill, you incorrigible tormentor!" cried the girl, drawing the
curtain across her window.

CHAPTER VIII.

The sleepless wretch on whom some trouble has fallen, so long as night
surrounds him, sees his future life as a boundless sea in which he is
sailing round and round like a shipwrecked man, but when the darkness
yields, the new and helpful day shows him a