s walking beside a girl,
almost a child, driving a flock of goats before her. Slender,
well-formed, with spare limbs, her skin a brown and velvety color, she
would have looked like a boy had it not been that her short tunic, open
on the left side, afforded glimpses of her slightly rounded breast, with
a gentle cup-like curve, as it were a bud beginning to expand with the
vigor of youth. Her black eyes, moist and large, seemed to fill her
whole face, bathing it with a mysterious effulgence, and through her
lips, dry and cracked by the wind, shone her white teeth, strong and
regular. Her hair knotted behind her neck she had adorned with a garland
of poppies plucked in the wheat. She carried over her shoulder with
masculine ease a heavy net filled with white cheeses as round as loaves
of bread, fresh, and still oozing whey. With her disengaged hand she was
caressing the white fleece of a straight-horned goat, her favorite,
which rubbed against her limbs, ringing a little copper bell worn on its
neck.

Actaeon was charmed contemplating her girlish figure, so sturdy for
labor, in which the freshness of youth triumphed over fatigue. Her
slenderness, with lines erect and harmonious, reminded him of the
elegance of the Tanagra figurines on the tables of the hetaerae of Athens;
of the imperious virility of the canephorae painted in black around Greek
vases.

The girl cast furtive glances at him, and then smiled, showing her teeth
with juvenile confidence on feeling herself admired.

"You are a Greek, are you not?"

She spoke like the people of the port, in that strange idiom of a
maritime city open to all peoples, a mixture of Celtiberian, Greek, and
Latin.

"I am from Athens. And you--who are you?"

"I am called Rhanto, and my mistress is Sonnica the rich. Have you not
heard of her? Her ships are in every port, she has slaves by the
hundred, and she drinks from cups of gold. Do you see above those olive
trees, on the side toward the sea, that small rose-colored tower? It is
the villa where she lives as soon as the passing of winter allows her to
leave the city. I belong at the villa, and I am in her service during
the open season. My father has charge of her flocks, and she often comes
down to our stables to play with the goats."

Actaeon was surprised at the frequency with which he had heard of Sonnica
since setting foot on Saguntine soil. The name of that opulent woman,
whom some called "the rich," and others "the co