apel close by, which they have made in the little
temple of Vesta. She promised her father to pray there before midnight;
she was forced to resign the blessing of her church at her marriage
with a heretic." The bride's graceful figure now vanished through the
vaulted doorway.

Modigisel began again: "Let me have your little maid, and take my big
sweetheart; you will make almost a hundred pounds by the bargain. True,
in this climate, one ought to choose a slender sweetheart. Is she a
free Roman? Then I, too, will _marry_ her. I won't stop for that."

"Keep your plump happiness, and leave me my slender one. I have by no
means drunk enough from the ocean to make that exchange."

Suddenly Astarte said loudly, "She's nothing but skin and bones!" Both
men started; had she understood their low whispers? Again the full lips
curled slightly, revealing her sharp eye-teeth.

"And eyes! those eyes!" replied Modigisel.

"Yes, bigger than her whole face. She looks like a chicken just out of
the shell!" sneered Astarte. "What is there so remarkable about her?"
The beauty's round eyes glittered with a sinister light.

"A soul, Carthaginian," replied the bridegroom.

"Women have no souls," retorted Astarte, gazing calmly at him. "So one
of the Fathers of the Church taught--or a philosopher. Some, instead of
the soul, have water, like that pygmy. Others have fire." She paused,
her breath coming quickly and heavily. Astarte was indeed beautiful at
that moment, diabolically, bewitchingly beautiful; the exquisitely
moulded, sphinxlike countenance was glowing with life.

"Fire," replied Thrasaric, averting his eyes from her ardent
gaze,--"fire belongs to hell."

Astarte made no answer.

"Eugenia is so beautiful because she is so chaste and pure," sighed
Glauke, who had heard a part of the conversation. Gazing sorrowfully
after the bride, she lowered her long lashes.

"No wonder that you hold her so firmly," Modigisel now said aloud in a
jeering tone. "After your attempt to abduct her failed, you besought
the old grain-usurer to give you the dainty doll as honorably as any
Roman fuller or baker ever wooed the daughter of his neighbor, the
cobbler."

"Yes," assented Gundomar; "but he has celebrated the wedding with as
much splendor as though he were wedding the daughter of an emperor."

"The splendor of the wedding is more to him than the bride," cried
Gundobad, laughing.

"Certainly not," said Thrasaric, slowly. "But one thin