Sirona looked after him as he hastened away.  Her gaze became more and more staring and glazed, and she felt as if the rock, on which she was sitting, were changing into the ship which had brought her from Massilia to Ostia.  Every heaving motion of the vessel, which had made her so giddy as it danced over the shifting waves, she now distinctly felt again, and at last it seemed as if a whirlpool had seized the ship, and was whirling it round faster and faster in a circle.  She closed her eyes, felt vaguely and in vain in the air for some holdfast, her head fell powerless on one side, and before her cheek sank upon her shoulder she uttered one feeble cry of distress, for she felt as if all her limbs were dropping from her body, as leaves in autumn fall from the boughs, and she fell back unconscious on the stony couch which Paulus had constructed for her.

It was the first swoon that Sirona, with her sound physical and mental powers, had ever experienced; but the strongest of her sex would have been overcome by the excitement, the efforts, the privations, and the sufferings which had that day befallen the unfortunate fair one.

At first she had fled without any plan out into the night and up the mountain; the moon lighted her on her way, and for fully an hour she continued her upward road without any rest.  Then she heard the voices of travellers who were coming towards her, and she left the beaten road and tried to get away from them, for she feared that her greyhound, which she still carried’ on her arm, would betray her by barking, or if they heard it whining, and saw it limp.  At last she had sunk down on a stone, and had reflected on all the events of the last few hours, and on what she had to do next.  She could look back dreamily on the past, and build castles in the air in a blue-skyed future-this was easy enough; but she did not find it easy to reflect with due deliberation, and to think in earnest.  Only one thing was perfectly clear to her:  she would rather starve and die of thirst, and shame, and misery-nay, she would rather be the instrument of her own death, than return to her husband.  She knew that she must in the first instance expect ill-usage, scorn, and imprisonment in a dark room at the Gaul’s hands; but all that seemed to her far more endurable than the tenderness with which he from time to time approached her.  When she thought of that, she shuddered and clenched her white teeth, and doubled her fists so tightly that her nails cut the flesh.  But what was she to do?  If Hermas were to meet her?  And yet what help could she look for from him, for what was he but a mere lad, and the thought of linking her life to his, if only for a day, appeared to her foolish and ridiculous.

Certainly she felt no inclination to repent or to blame herself; still it had been a great folly on her part to call him into the house for the sake of amusing herself with him.

Then she recollected the severe punishment she had once suffered, because, when she was still quite little, and without meaning any harm, she had taken her father’s water-clock to pieces, and had spoiled it.