“Oh!” exclaimed Antinous, joyfully clapping his hands.

“Evoe Bacche!” cried Hadrian, tossing up his cup that stood on his table.  “You are free till this evening, Mastor, and you my boy, go and talk to Pollux, the sculptor.  He shall be our guide and he will provide us with wreaths and some mad disguise.  I must see drunken men, I must laugh with the jolliest before I am Caesar again.  Make haste, my friend, or new cares will come to spoil my holiday mood.”

CHAPTER XXII.

Antinous and Mastor at once quitted the Emperor’s room; in the corridor the lad beckoned the slave to him and said in a low voice: 

“You can hold your tongue I know, will you do me a favor?”

“Three sooner than one,” replied the Sarmatian.

“You are free to-day—­are you going into the city?”

“I think so.”

“You are not known here, but that does not matter.  Take these gold pieces and in the flower-market buy with one of them the most beautiful bunch of flowers you can find, with another you may make merry, and out of the remainder spend a drachma in hiring an ass.  The driver will conduct you to the garden of Pudeus’ widow where stands the house of dame Hannah; you remember the name?”

“Dame Hannah and the widow of Pudeus.”

“And at the little house, not the big one, leave the flowers for the sick Selene.”

“The daughter of the fat steward, who was attacked by our big dog?” asked Mastor, curiously.

“She or another,” said Antinous, impatiently, “and when they ask you who sent the flowers, say ‘the friend at Lochias,’ nothing more.  You understand.”

The slave nodded and said to himself:  “What! you too-oh! these women.”

Antinous signed to him to be silent, impressed on him in a few hasty words that he was to be discreet and to pick out the very choicest flowers, and then betook himself into the hall of the Muses to seek Pollux.  From him he had learnt where to find the suffering Selene, of whom he could not help thinking incessantly and wherever he might be.  He did not find the sculptor in his screened-off nook; prompted by a wish to speak to his mother, Pollux had gone down to the gatehouse where he was now standing before her and frankly narrating, with many eager gestures of his long arms, all that had occurred on the previous night.  His story flowed on like a song of triumph, and when he described how the holiday procession had carried away Arsinoe and himself, the old woman jumped up from her chair and clapping her fat little hands, she exclaimed: 

“Ah! that is pleasure, that is happiness!  I remember flying along with your father in just the same way thirty years ago.”

“And since thirty years,” Pollux interposed.  “I can still remember very well how at one of the great Dionysiac festivals, fired by the power of the god, you rushed through the streets with a deer-skin over your shoulders.”