he bath ready filled, and
scented with carefully plucked rose leaves floating upon the water. But
all this display of magnificent luxury and elaborate taste, if regarded
by her at all, now seemed to affect her with weariness rather than with
pleasure.

Why, as she lay down upon her couch, and prepared to yield herself up to
pleasant slumber, did her thoughts wander back to the time when poverty
instead of luxury had been her lot? Why did those olden memories of the
past so strongly haunt her? They were, perhaps, never entirely absent
from her heart; but now they thronged about her with a force that would
not bear repression. Perhaps it was that the very magnificence and pomp
of power of which she was now the centre, recalled the memory of the
distant past, by virtue of strong contrast alone; perhaps that the
unsatisfied longing and vague foreboding of her soul necessarily
impressed upon her the consciousness that wealth and honor alone cannot
give perfect happiness, and thereby naturally led her thoughts back to
the time when she had found true content in poverty and loneliness.
However that might be, now, as she closed her eyes and shut out the view
of the costly adornments around her, more vividly than ever before were
pictured before her mind the scenes of her childhood: her father's
cottage on the outskirts of Ostia--the olive grove upon the slope
behind--the roadside well, where the villagers would sometimes gather
about some invalided soldier from the German army, and listen to his
tales of the last campaign--and in front, the bay, sparkling in the
bright glare of the sun and laden with the corn-freighted ships of
Alexandria.

And there, too, was the old wave-worn rock--the scene of her life's only
romance--where, stealing out from her father's cabin at the evening
hour, and seating herself so close to the waterline that the spray of
the tideless sea would dash up and bathe her naked feet, she would wait
in all innocence for the coming of the young sailor from Samos. How
rapidly those hours used to pass! How pleadingly, on the last evening,
he had knelt beside her, with his arm resting upon her knee, and there,
gazing up into her face, had asked her for one long tress of hair! How
foolish she had been to give it to him; and how earnestly he had vowed
that he would come back some day, no longer poor and forlorn, but in his
own two-masted vessel, with full banks of oars, manned by the slaves
whom he would capture,