, and, touching
her temple gently with his fingers, he gazed at her with that admiration
with which a critic gazes at a statue from the chisel of a master.

"Eunice," asked he, "dost thou know that thou art not a slave this long
time?"

She raised to him her calm eyes, as blue as the sky, and denied with a
motion of her head.

"I am thine always," said she.

"But perhaps thou knowest not," continued Petronius, "that the villa,
and those slaves twining wreaths here, and all which is in the villa,
with the fields and the herds, are thine henceforward."

Eunice, when she heard this, drew away from him quickly, and asked in a
voice filled with sudden fear,--

"Why dost thou tell me this?"

Then she approached again, and looked at him, blinking with amazement.
After a while her face became as pale as linen. He smiled, and said only
one word,--

"So!"

A moment of silence followed; merely a slight breeze moved the leaves of
the beech.

Petronius might have thought that before him was a statue cut from white
marble.

"Eunice," said he, "I wish to die calmly."

And the maiden, looking at him with a heart-rending smile, whispered,--

"I hear thee."

In the evening the guests, who had been at feasts given by Petronius
previously, and knew that in comparison with them even Caesar's banquets
seemed tiresome and barbarous, began to arrive in numbers. To no one did
it occur, even, that that was to be the last "symposium." Many knew,
it is true, that the clouds of Caesar's anger were hanging over the
exquisite arbiter; but that had happened so often, and Petronius had
been able so often to scatter them by some dexterous act or by a single
bold word, that no one thought really that serious danger threatened
him. His glad face and usual smile, free of care, confirmed all, to the
last man, in that opinion. The beautiful Eunice, to whom he had declared
his wish to die calmly, and for whom every word of his was like an
utterance of fate, had in her features a perfect calmness, and in her
eyes a kind of wonderful radiance, which might have been considered
delight. At the door of the triclinium, youths with hair in golden nets
put wreaths of roses on the heads of the guests, warning them, as the
custom was, to pass the threshold right foot foremost. In the hall there
was a slight odor of violets; the lamps burned in Alexandrian glass of
various colors. At the couches stood Grecian maidens, whose office it
was to moisten t