patron.  She received no letters save those from her mother, uncle, or Ahenobarbus; she saw no visitors; she was not allowed to go outside of the walls of the villa, nor indeed upon any of its terraces where she would be exposed to sight from without, whether by land or sea.  At every step, at every motion, she was confronted with the barriers built around her, and by the consciousness that, so long as she persisted in her present attitude, her durance was likely to continue unrelaxed.

Cornelia was thirsty for the news from the world without.  Her keepers were dumb to the most harmless inquiry.  Her mother wrote more of the latest fashions than of the progress of events in the Senate and in the field; besides, Claudia—­as Cornelia knew very well—­never took her political notions from any one except her brother-in-law, and Cornelia noted her mother’s rambling observations accordingly.  Lentulus studiously refrained from adverting to politics in letters to his niece.  Ahenobarbus wrote of wars and rumours of wars, but in a tone of such partisan venom and overreaching sarcasm touching all things Caesarian, that Cornelia did not need her prejudices to tell her that Lucius was simply abusing her credulity.

Then at last all the letters stopped.  Phaon had no explanation to give.  He would not suffer his evil, smiling lips to tell the story of the flight of the oligarchs from Rome, and confess that Lentulus and Claudia were no farther off than Capua.  The consul had ordered that his niece should not know of their proximity and its cause,—­lest she pluck up hope, and all his coercion be wasted.  So there was silence, and that was all.  Even her mother did not write to her.  Cornelia grew very, very lonely and desolate—­more than words may tell.  She had one consolation—­Drusus was not dead, or she would have been informed of it!  Proof that her lover was dead would have been a most delightful weapon in Lentulus’s hands, too delightful to fail to use instantly.  And so Cornelia hoped on.

She tried again to build a world of fantasy, of unreal delight, around her; to close her eyes, and wander abroad with her imagination.  She roamed in reverie over land and sea, from Atlantis to Serica; and dwelt in the dull country of the Hyperboreans and saw the gold-sanded plains of the Ethiops.  She took her Homer and fared with Odysseus into Polyphemus’s cave, and out to the land of Circe; and heard the Sirens sing, and abode on Calypso’s fairy isle; and saw the maiden Nausicaa and her maids at the ball-play on the marge of the stream.  But it was sorry work; for ever and again the dream-woven mist would break, and the present—­stern, unchanging, joyless—­she would see, and that only.

Cornelia was thrown more and more back on her books.  In fact, had she been deprived of that diversion, she must have succumbed in sheer wretchedness; but Phaon, for all his crafty guile, did not realize that a roll of AEschylus did almost as much to undo his jailer’s work as a traitor among his underlings.