augh, but from no one a frank speech or
full utterance. For a moment he felt as if he had found admittance to the
abode of whispering calumny, and yet he knew why here no one dared to
speak out or above a murmur. Loud voices hurt the Empress, and a clear
voice was a misery to her, and yet few men possessed so loud and
penetrating a chest voice as her husband, who was not wont to lay
restraint upon himself for any human being, not even for his wife.

Sabina sat on a large divan, more like a couch than a chair; her feet
were buried in the shaggy fell of a buffalo, and her knees and ankles
wrapped round with down-cushions covered with silk. Her head she held
very upright, and it was difficult to imagine how her slender throat
could support it, loaded as it was with strings of pearls and precious
stones which were braided in the tall structure of her reddish-gold hair,
that was arranged in long cylindrical curls pinned closely side by side.
The Empress's thin face looked particularly small under the mass of
natural and artificial adornment which towered above her brow. Beautiful
she could never have been, even in her youth, but her features were
regular, and the prefect confessed to himself as he looked at Sabina's
face, marked as it was with minute wrinkles and touched up with red and
white, that the sculptor who a few years previously had been commissioned
to represent her as 'Venus Victrix' might very well have given the
goddess a certain amount of resemblance to the imperial model. If only
her eyes, which were absolutely bereft of lashes, had not been quite so
small and keen--in spite of the dark lines painted round them--and if
only the sinews in her throat had not stood out quite so conspicuously
from the flesh which formerly had covered them!

With a deep bow Titianus took the Empress's right hand, covered with
rings; but she withdrew it quickly from that of her husband's friend and
relative, as if she feared that the carefully-cherished limb--useless as
it was for any practical purpose, a mere toy among hands--might suffer
some injury, and wrapped it and her arm in her upper-robe. But she
returned the prefect's friendly greeting with all the warmth at her
command. Though formerly at Rome she had been accustomed to see Titianus
every day at her house, this was their first meeting in Alexandria; for
the previous day, exhausted by the sufferings of her sea-voyage, she had
been carried in a closed litter to the Caesareu