reject such a
pleasing gift.'

'Let it be as my lord says,' responded AEnone. 'And if I fail in due
utterance of my thanks, impute it not to want of appreciation of the
gift, but rather to inability of proper expression.'

It was with real gratitude that AEnone spoke; for, at the instant, a
thought of cheering import flashed upon her, swelling her heart with
joy, and causing her to welcome the captive girl as a gift from the
gods. Here, perhaps, as though in direct answer to her prayer for
sympathy, might be the one for whom her heart had been longing; coming
to her, not laden with any of that haughty pride and ill-befitting
knowledge with which the Roman world about her reeked, but rather as she
herself had once come--with all her unstained provincial innocence of
thought yet nestling in her shrinking soul--one, like herself, an exile
from a lowly state, and with a heart filled with those simple memories
which must not be too carelessly exposed--so seldom do they gather from
without anything but cruel ridicule or cold lack of comprehension--one
whom she could educate into an easy intimacy with her own impulses and
yearnings, and thus, forgetting all social differences, draw closer and
nearer to her as a friend and confidant.

As she thus reflected, she felt the soft pressure of lips upon her left
hand, which hung idly at her side, and, looking down, she saw that the
captive girl had knelt before her, and, while lightly grasping her
fingers, was gazing up into her face with a pleading glance. AEnone's
first impulse was to respond with eager warmth to that humble appeal for
protection and friendship; and had it not been for the morbid fear she
felt lest her husband, who stood looking on, might chide such
familiarity, or at the least might cast ridicule upon the feeling which
prompted it, she would have raised the captive girl and folded her in
her arms. As it was, the impulse was too spontaneous and sudden to be
entirely resisted, and she held forth her other hand to lift the
kneeling figure, when a strange, intuitive perception of something which
she could scarcely explain, caused her to withhold further action.

Something, she knew not what, in the attitude and expression of the
captive before her, which sent her warm blood flowing back with a
chilled current--something which told her that her hopes of the moment
had been smitten with decay as suddenly as they had been raised, and
that, instead of a friend, she ha