‘Ill, Nydia!—­yet your cheek has more color than it had last year.’

‘I am often ailing,’ said the blind girl, touchingly; ’and as I grow up I grieve more that I am blind.  But now to the flowers!’ So saying, she made a slight reverence with her head, and passing into the viridarium, busied herself with watering the flowers.

‘Poor Nydia,’ thought Glaucus, gazing on her; ’thine is a hard doom!  Thou seest not the earth—­nor the sun—­nor the ocean—­nor the stars—­above all, thou canst not behold Ione.’

At that last thought his mind flew back to the past evening, and was a second time disturbed in its reveries by the entrance of Clodius.  It was a proof how much a single evening had sufficed to increase and to refine the love of the Athenian for Ione, that whereas he had confided to Clodius the secret of his first interview with her, and the effect it had produced on him, he now felt an invincible aversion even to mention to him her name.  He had seen Ione, bright, pure, unsullied, in the midst of the gayest and most profligate gallants of Pompeii, charming rather than awing the boldest into respect, and changing the very nature of the most sensual and the least ideal—­as by her intellectual and refining spells she reversed the fable of Circe, and converted the animals into men.  They who could not understand her soul were made spiritual, as it were, by the magic of her beauty—­they who had no heart for poetry had ears, at least, for the melody of her voice.  Seeing her thus surrounded, purifying and brightening all things with her presence, Glaucus almost for the first time felt the nobleness of his own nature—­he felt how unworthy of the goddess of his dreams had been his companions and his pursuits.  A veil seemed lifted from his eyes; he saw that immeasurable distance between himself and his associates which the deceiving mists of pleasure had hitherto concealed; he was refined by a sense of his courage in aspiring to Ione.  He felt that henceforth it was his destiny to look upward and to soar.  He could no longer breathe that name, which sounded to the sense of his ardent fancy as something sacred and divine, to lewd and vulgar ears.  She was no longer the beautiful girl once seen and passionately remembered—­she was already the mistress, the divinity of his soul.  This feeling who has not experienced?—­If thou hast not, then thou hast never loved.

When Clodius therefore spoke to him in affected transport of the beauty of Ione, Glaucus felt only resentment and disgust that such lips should dare to praise her; he answered coldly, and the Roman imagined that his passion was cured instead of heightened.  Clodius scarcely regretted it, for he was anxious that Glaucus should marry an heiress yet more richly endowed—­Julia, the daughter of the wealthy Diomed, whose gold the gamester imagined he could readily divert into his own coffers.  Their conversation did not flow with its usual ease; and no sooner had Clodius left him than Glaucus bent his way to the house of Ione.  In passing by the threshold he again encountered Nydia, who had finished her graceful task.  She knew his step on the instant.