a reply, but in vain; and as her grandmother remained
silent she went back to her place by the pedestal. At last Damia raised
her wrinkled face, looked straight in the girl's eyes and asked:

"And what is to be the end of it?"

"Aye--what?" said Gorgo gloomily and she shook her head. "I ask myself
and can find no answer, for his image is ever present to me and yet walls
and mountains stand between us. That face, that image--I might perhaps
force myself to shatter it; but nothing shall ever induce me to let it be
defiled or disgraced! Nothing!"

The old woman sank into brooding thought once more; mechanically she
repeated Gorgo's last word, and at intervals that gradually became longer
she murmured, at last scarcely audibly: "Nothing--nothing!"

She had lost all sense of time and of her immediate surroundings, and
long-forgotten sorrows crowded on her memory: The dreadful day when a
young freedman--a gifted astronomer and philosopher who had been
appointed her tutor, and whom she had loved with all the passion of a
vehement nature--had been kicked out of her father's house by slaves, for
daring to aspire to her hand. She had given him up--she had been forced
to do so; and after she was the wife of another and he had risen to fame,
she had never given him any token that she had not forgotten him. Two
thirds of a century lay between that happy and terrible time, and the
present. He had been dead many a long year, and still she remembered him,
and was thinking of him even now. A singular effort of fancy showed her
herself, as she had then been, and Gorgo--whom she saw not with her
bodily eyes, though the girl was standing in front of her--two young
creatures side by side. The two were but one in her vision; the same
anguish that embittered one life now threatened the other. But after all
she, Damia, had dragged this grief after her through the weary decades,
like the iron ball at the end of a chain which keeps the galley-slave to
his place at the oar, and from which he can no more escape than from a
ponderous and ever-present shadow; and Gorgo's sorrow could not at any
rate be for long, since the end of all things was at hand--it was coming
slowly but with inevitable certainty, nearer and nearer every hour.

When had a troop of enthusiastic students and hastily-collected
peasant-soldiers ever been able to snake an effectual stand against the
hosts of Rome? Damia, who only a few minutes since had spoken with such
determi