A nightingale broke into song among the rose bushes.  Her face was like a girl’s as she thought of Ovid, with the grape leaves above his vivid face, young as the gods are young, seeking her eyes with his.  A faint smell, as of homely things, rose from the familiar earth.  Lights began to appear in the windows of the villa.  She had come to this home when she and Ovid were married, and this morning she had again offered her tranquil prayers to the Penates so long her own.  The happy years broke in upon her.  Ah, yes, she and her husband had the divine essence of youth within them.  But they had something finer too, something that comes only to middle age—­the sense of security and peace, the assurance that, except for death, no violent changes lay ahead of them.  She had only to nurture, as they faced old age together, a happiness already in full measure theirs.

As she turned toward the house she met her husband, come himself to seek her.  In the recurrent springs of her after life the faint smell of the burgeoning earth filled her with an unappeasable desire.

II

The next week Fidus and Perilla started for Libya, leaving the two children with their grandfather rather than expose them to the dangers of the African climate.  Ovid and Fabia spent the summer as usual in the cool Apennines at the old family homestead at Sulmo.  They lingered on into the autumn for the sake of the vintage, a favourite season with them, and did not return to their beautiful town house at the foot of the Capitoline hill until late in October.  While Fabia was busy with the household readjustments entailed by the presence of the children with their attendants and tutors, and before social engagements should become too numerous, Ovid spent several hours each day over his Metamorphoses, to which he was giving the final polish.  Patient work of this kind was always distasteful to him and he welcomed any chance to escape from it.  At the end of November Fabia’s cousin, Fabius Maximus, went to the island of Elba to look after some family mines, and Ovid made his wife’s business interests a pretext for a short trip up the Tuscan coast in his company.  He was to be back for a dinner at Macer’s, his fellow poet’s, on the Ides of December, to meet some friends of both from Athens.

On the morning of the eighth day before the Ides a message came to Fabia from the Palace asking where Ovid was.  The inquiry seemed flattering and Fabia wondered what pleasant attention was in store for her husband.  As it happened, she saw no one outside of her own household either that day or the next, being kept indoors by the necessity of installing new servants sent down from the estate at Sulmo.  She was, therefore, entirely unprepared for the appalling public news which her uncle, Rufus, brought to her in the early evening of the seventh day before the Ides.  There was something almost terrifying in