s, and Cornelia, with
perfect frankness, said aloud to herself, "You are so beautiful that
Drusus can't help loving you;" and with this candid confession, she
was again on the terrace, straining her eyes toward Puteoli. Boats
came, boats went, but there was none that approached the villa; and
Cornelia began to harbour dark thoughts against Cassandra.

"If the wretched woman had played false to her mistress again--" but
the threat was never formulated. There was a chink and click of a pair
of oars moving on their thole-pins. For an instant a skiff was visible
at the foot of the embankment; two occupants were in it. The boat
disappeared under the friendly cover of the protecting sea-wall of the
lower terrace. There was a little landing-place here, with a few steps
leading upward, where now and then a yacht was moored. The embankment
shut off this tiny wharf from view on either side. Cornelia dared not
leave the upper terrace. Her heart beat faster and faster. Below she
heard the slap, slap, of the waves on the sea-wall, and a rattle of
rings and ropes as some skiff was being made fast. An instant more and
Drusus was coming, with quick, athletic bounds, up the stairway to the
second terrace. It was he! she saw him! In her eyes he was everything
in physique and virile beauty that a maiden of the Republic could
desire! The bitterness and waiting of months were worth the
blessedness of the instant. Cornelia never knew what Drusus said to
her, or what she said to him. She only knew that he was holding her in
his strong arms and gazing into her eyes; while the hearts of both
talked to one another so fast that they had neither time nor need for
words. They were happy, happy! Long it was before their utterance
passed beyond the merest words of endearment; longer still before they
were composed enough for Cornelia to listen to Drusus while he gave
his own account of Mamercus's heroic resistance to Dumnorix's gang at
Praeneste; and told of his own visit to Ravenna, of his intense
admiration for the proconsul of the two Gauls; and of how he had come
to Puteoli and opened communications with Cassandra, through Cappadox,
the trusty body-servant who in the guise of a fisherman was waiting in
the boat below.

"And as Homer puts it, so with us," cried Cornelia, at length: "'And
so the pair had joy in happy love, and joyed in talking too, and each
relating; she, the royal lady, what she had endured at home, watching
the wasteful throng