‘None of escape till Arbaces gives the word.’

’Well, then, said Nydia, quickly, ’thou wilt not, at least, refuse to take a letter for me:  thy master cannot kill thee for that.’

‘To whom?’

‘The praetor.’

’To a magistrate?  No—­not I. I should be made a witness in court, for what I know; and the way they cross-examine the slaves is by the torture.’

’Pardon:  I meant not the praetor—­it was a word that escaped me unawares:  I meant quite another person—­the gay Sallust.’

‘Oh! and what want you with him?’

’Glaucus was my master; he purchased me from a cruel lord.  He alone has been kind to me.  He is to die.  I shall never live happily if I cannot, in his hour of trial and doom, let him know that one heart is grateful to him.  Sallust is his friend; he will convey my message.’

’I am sure he will do no such thing.  Glaucus will have enough to think of between this and to-morrow without troubling his head about a blind girl.’

‘Man,’ said Nydia, rising, ’wilt thou become free?  Thou hast the offer in thy power; to-morrow it will be too late.  Never was freedom more cheaply purchased.  Thou canst easily and unmissed leave home:  less than half an hour will suffice for thine absence.  And for such a trifle wilt thou refuse liberty?’

Sosia was greatly moved.  It was true that the request was remarkably silly; but what was that to him?  So much the better.  He could lock the door on Nydia, and, if Arbaces should learn his absence, the offence was venial, and would merit but a reprimand.  Yet, should Nydia’s letter contain something more than what she had said—­should it speak of her imprisonment, as he shrewdly conjectured it would do—­what then!  It need never be known to Arbaces that he had carried the letter.  At the worst the bribe was enormous—­the risk light—­the temptation irresistible.  He hesitated no longer—­he assented to the proposal.

’Give me the trinkets, and I will take the letter.  Yet stay—­thou art a slave—­thou hast no right to these ornaments—­they are thy master’s.’

’They were the gifts of Glaucus; he is my master.  What chance hath he to claim them?  Who else will know they are in my possession?’

‘Enough—­I will bring thee the papyrus.’

‘No, not papyrus—­a tablet of wax and a stilus.’

Nydia, as the reader will have seen, was born of gentle parents.  They had done all to lighten her calamity, and her quick intellect seconded their exertions.  Despite her blindness, she had therefore acquired in childhood, though imperfectly, the art to write with the sharp stilus upon waxen tablets, in which her exquisite sense of touch came to her aid.  When the tablets were brought to her, she thus painfully traced some words in Greek, the language of her childhood, and which almost every Italian of the higher ranks was then supposed to know.  She carefully wound round the epistle the thread, and covered its knot with wax; and ere she placed it in the hands of Sosia, she thus addressed him: