Julia had at first been cold and hard to Malchus, but gradually her manner had changed, and she now spoke kindly and condescendingly to him, and would sometimes sit looking at him from under her dark eyebrows with an expression which Malchus altogether failed to interpret.  Clotilde was more clear sighted.  One day meeting Malchus alone in the atrium she said to him:  “Malchus, do you know that I fear Julia is learning to love you.  I see it in her face, in the glance of her eye, in the softening of that full mouth of hers.”

“You are dreaming, little Clotilde,” Malchus said laughing.

“I am not,” she said firmly; “I tell you she loves you.”

“Impossible!” Malchus said incredulously.  “The haughty Julia, the fairest of the Roman maidens, fall in love with a slave!  You are dreaming, Clotilde.”

“But you are not a common slave, Malchus, you are a Carthaginian noble and the cousin of Hannibal.  You are her equal in all respects.”

“Save for this gold collar,” Malchus said, touching the badge of slavery lightly.

“Are you sure you do not love her in return, Malchus?  She is very beautiful.”

“Is she?” Malchus said carelessly.  “Were she fifty times more beautiful it would make no difference to me, for, as you know as well as I do, I love some one else.”

Clotilde flushed to the brow.  “You have never said so,” she said softly.

“What occasion to say so when you know it?  You have always known it, ever since the day when we went over the bridge together.”

“But I am no fit mate for you,” she said.  “Even when my father was alive and the tribe unbroken, what were we that I should wed a great Carthaginian noble?  Now the tribe is broken, I am only a Roman slave.”

“Have you anything else to observe?” Malchus said quietly.

“Yes, a great deal more,” she went on urgently.  “How could you present your wife, an ignorant Gaulish girl, to your relatives, the haughty dames of Carthage?  They would look down upon me and despise me.”

“Clotilde, you are betraying yourself,” Malchus said smiling, “for you have evidently thought the matter over in every light.  No,” he said, detaining her, as, with an exclamation of shame, she would have fled away, “you must not go.  You knew that I loved you, and for every time you have thought of me, be it ever so often, I have thought of you a score.  You knew that I loved you and intended to ask your hand from your father.  As for the dames of Carthage, I think not of carrying you there; but if you will wed me I will settle down for life among your people.”

A footstep was heard approaching.  Malchus pressed Clotilde for a moment against his breast, and then he was alone.  The newcomer was Sempronius.  He was still a frequent visitor, but he was conscious that he had lately lost rather than gained ground in the good graces of Julia.  Averse as he had been from the first to the introduction of Malchus into the household, he was not long in discovering the reason for the change in Julia, and the dislike he had from the first felt of Malchus had deepened to a feeling of bitter hatred.