In the evening at supper she appeared dressed in black, like Sabina and all the rest of the suite, but she was calm and ready with an answer to every observation.

Pontius had travelled with them from Thebes to Besa, and she had spared him nothing that could punish him for his long absence, and had mercilessly compelled him to listen to all her verses on Antinous.

He meanwhile had been perfectly cool about it, and had criticised her poems exactly as if they had referred not to a man of flesh and blood but to some statue or god.  This epigram he would praise, the next he would disparage, a third condemn.  Her confession that she had been in the habit of complimenting Antinous with flowers and fruit he heard with a shrug of the shoulders, saying pleasantly:  “Give him as many presents as you will; I know that you expect no gifts from your divinity in return for your sacrifices.”

His words had surprised and delighted her.  Pontius always understood her, and did not deserve that she should wound him.  So she let him gaze into her soul, and told him how much she loved Antinous so long as he was absent.  Then she laughed and confessed that she was perfectly indifferent to him as soon as they were together.

When, after the Bithynian’s death, she lost all self-control he simply let her alone, and begged Claudia to do the same.

The same day that the body was found it was burnt on a pile of precious wood.  Hadrian had refused to see it when he learnt that the death by drowning had terribly distorted the lad’s features.

A few hours after the ashes of the Bithynian had been collected and brought in a golden vase to Hadrian, the Nile fleet was once more under sail, this time with the Emperor on board one of the boats, to proceed without farther halt to Alexandria.

Hadrian remained alone with only his slave and his secretary on the boat that conveyed him; but he several times sent to Pontius to desire him to come from the ship on which he was and visit him on his.  He liked to hear the architect’s deep voice, and discussed with him the plans which Pontius had sketched for his mausoleum in Rome and the monument to his lost favorite which he proposed to have erected from designs of his own in the large city which he intended should stand on the site of the little town of Besa, and which he had already named Antinoe.  But these discussions only took up a limited number of hours, and then the architect was at liberty to return to Sabina’s boat, on which Balbilla also lived.

A few days after they had quitted Besa he was sitting alone with the poetess on the deck of the Nile boat which, borne by the current and propelled by a hundred oars, was rapidly and steadily nearing its destination.  Ever since the death of the hapless favorite Pontius had avoided mentioning him to her.  She had now become as observant and as talkative as before, and in her eyes there even shone at times a ray of the