“Balbilla.”

“Balbilla?  There are many of that name.  What is she like, the lady you mean?” asked Hadrian, with a cunning glance of amusement.

“That is easier to ask than to answer,” replied the artist, who, seeing his gray-bearded companion smile, recovered his gay vivacity, “But stay—­you have seen a peacock spread its tail—­now only imagine that every eye in the train of Hera’s bird was a graceful round curl, and that in the middle of the circle there was a charming, intelligent girl’s face, with a merry little nose, and a rather too high forehead, and you will have the portrait of the young damsel who has graciously permitted me to model from her person.”

Hadrian laughed heartily, threw off his cloak, and exclaimed: 

“Stand aside—­I know your maiden—­and if I mean a different one you shall tell me.”

While he was still speaking he had plunged his powerful hands into the yielding clay, and kneading and pinching like a practised modeller, wiping off and pressing on, he formed a woman’s face with a towering structure of curls, which resembled Balbilla, but which reproduced every conspicuous peculiarity with such whimsical exaggeration that Pollux could not contain his delight.  When at last Hadrian stepped back from the happy caricature and called upon him to say whether that were not indeed the Roman lady, Pollux exclaimed: 

“It is as surely she, as you are not merely a great architect, but an admirable sculptor.  The thing is coarse, but unmistakably characteristic.”

The Emperor himself seemed to enjoy his artistic joke hugely, for he looked at it, and laughed again and again.  Pontius, however, seemed to view it differently; he had listened with eager sympathy to the conversation between Hadrian and the sculptor, and had watched the former as he began his work; but as it went on he turned away, for he hated that distortion of fine forms, which he often found that the Egyptians took a special delight in.  It was positively painful to him to see a graceful, highly-gifted and defenceless creature, to whom, too, he felt himself bound by ties of gratitude, mocked at in this way by such a man as Hadrian.  He had only to-day met Balbilla for the first time, but he had heard from Titianus that she was staying at the Caesareum with the Empress, and the prefect had also told him that she was the granddaughter of that same governor, Claudius Balbillus, who had granted freedom to his own grandfather, a learned Greek slave.

He had met her with grateful sympathy and devotion; her bright and lively nature had delighted him, and at each thoughtless word she uttered he would have liked to give her some warning sign, as though she were near to him through some tie of blood, or some old established friendship that might warrant his right to do so.  The defiant, half gallant way in which Verus, the dissipated lady-killer, had spoken to her had enraged him and filled him with anxiety, and long after the illustrious visitors had left Lochias he had thought of her again and again, and had resolved, if it were possible, to keep a watchful eye on the descendant of the benefactor of his family.  He felt it as a sacred duty to shelter and protect her, seeming to him as she did, an airy, pretty, defenceless song-bird.