on.

On Agellius's entering the room, Aristo was pacing to and fro in some
discomposure; however, he ran up to his friend, embraced him, and, looking
at him with significance, congratulated him on his good looks. "There is
more fire in your eye," he said, "dear Agellius, and more eloquence in the
turn of your lip, than I have ever yet seen. A new spirit is in you. So
you are determined to come out of your solitude? That you should have been
able to exist in it so long is the wonderment to me."

Agellius had recovered himself, yet he dared not look again on Callista.
"Do not jest, Aristo," he said; "I am come, as you know, to talk to you
about your sister. I have brought her a present of flowers; they are my
best present, or rather not mine, but the birth of the opening year, as
fair and fragrant as herself."

"We will offer them to our Pallas Athene," said his friend, "to whom we
artists are especially devout." And he would have led Agellius on, and
made him place them in her niche in the opposite wall.

"I am more serious than you are," said Agellius; "and I have brought the
best my garden contains as an offering to your sister. _She_ will not
think I bring them for any other purpose. Where are you going?" he
continued, as he saw his friend take down his broad _petasus_.

"Why," answered Aristo, "since I am so poor an interpreter of your
meaning, you can dispense with me altogether. I will leave you to speak
for yourself, and meanwhile will go and see what old Dromo has to tell,
before the sun is too high in the heavens."

Saying this, with a half-imploring, half-satirical look at his sister, he
set off to the barber's at the Forum.

Agellius took up the flowers, and laid them on the table before her, as
she sat at work. "Do you accept my flowers, Callista?" he asked.

"Fair and fragrant, like myself, are they?" she made reply. "Give them to
me." She took them, and bent over them. "The blushing rose," she said,
gravely, "the stately lily, the royal carnation, the golden moly, the
purple amaranth, the green bryon, the diosanthos, the sertula, the sweet
modest saliunca, fit emblems of Callista. Well, in a few hours they will
have faded; yes, they will get more and more like her."

She paused and looked him steadily in the face, and then continued:
"Agellius, I once had a slave who belonged to your religion. She had been
born in a Christian family, and came into my possession on her master's
death. She was unlike