nly Iambe were well, and if I succeeded in reaching
Alexandria, my destiny would perhaps take a turn for the better."

Paulus had risen while she spoke, and had taken the pot from the hearth;
he now offered it to his guest, saying:

"For the present we will trust to this broth to compensate to you for the
delights of the capital; I am glad that you relish it. But tell me now,
have you seriously considered what danger may threaten a beautiful,
young, and unprotected woman in the wicked city of the Greeks? Would it
not be better that you should submit to the consequences of your guilt,
and return to Phoebicius, to whom unfortunately you belong?"

Sirona, at these words, had set down the vessel out of which she was
eating, and rising in passionate haste, she exclaimed:

"That shall never, never be!--And when I was sitting up there half-dead,
and took your step for that of Phoebicius, the gods showed me a way to
escape from him, and from you or anyone who would drag me back to him.
When I fled to the edge of the abyss, I was raving and crazed, but what I
then would have done in my madness, I would do now in cold blood--as
surely as I hope to see my own people in Arelas once more! What was I
once, and to what have I come through Phoebicius! Life was to me a sunny
garden with golden trellises and shady trees and waters as bright as
crystal, with rosy flowers and singing birds; and he, he has darkened its
light, and fouled its springs, and broken down its flowers. All now seems
dumb and colorless, and if the abyss is my grave, no one will miss me nor
mourn for me."

"Poor woman!" said Paulus. "Your husband then showed you very little
love."

"Love," laughed Sirona, "Phoebicius and love! Only yesterday I told you,
how cruelly he used to torture me after his feasts, when he was drunk or
when he recovered from one of his swoons. But one thing he did to me, one
thing which broke the last thread of a tie between us. No one yet has
ever heard a word of it from me; not even Dorothea, who often blamed me
when I let slip a hard word against my husband. It was well for her to
talk--if I had found a husband like Petrus I might perhaps have been like
Dorothea. It is a marvel, which I myself do not understand, that I did
not grow wicked with such a man, a man who--why should I conceal it--who,
when we were at Rome, because he was in debt, and because he hoped to get
promotion through his legate Quintillus, sold me--me--to him. He hims