What malice had invented as a calumny happened in this instance to be a truth. Pomponia was indeed a secret Christian. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and none can tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. She had accompanied her husband when he had been sent to subdue Britain, and had known the agonies of long and intensely anxious separation from him, and during those periods of trial she had been compelled to be much alone, and part of the time she had spent in Gaul. Persis, her confidential handmaid, had met one of the early missionaries of the faith, had heard his message, had been converted. Accident had revealed the fact to the noble Roman lady; and as she talked with Persis in many a long and lonely hour, her heart too had been touched by grace, and a life always pure had now become the life of a saint of God. Plautius was glad to notice the manly interest taken by Britannicus in the country from which his name had been derived, and in martial achievements rather than in the debasing effeminacies of the Roman nobles. He always welcomed the boy’s presence, and introduced him to the kind hospitalities of his wife. Both parents were glad that a scion of the Cæsars who seemed to show the old Roman virtues of modesty and manliness should be a frequent companion of their own son, the young Aulus. To Pomponia the son of Claudius felt strongly drawn. She was wholly unlike any type of woman he had ever seen; she seemed to be separated by whole worlds of difference from such ladies as his own mother, Messalina, or his stepmother, Agrippina; and though she only dressed in simple and sombre garments, yet the peace and sweetness which breathed from her countenance made her more lovely in his eyes than the great wives of Consuls and senators whom he had so often seen sweeping through gilded chambers on the Palatine in their gleaming and gold-embroidered robes. He noticed, too, that his sister, the Empress Octavia, never visited her without coming home in a happier and more contented mood. One day, being more than ever filled with admiration for her goodness, he had spoken to her freely of all his bitter trials, of all his terrible misgivings. She had impressed on him the duties of resignation and forgiveness; and had tried to show him that in a mind conscious of integrity he might have a possession better and more abiding than if he sat amid numberless temptations to baseness on an uneasy throne. ‘You speak,’ he said, ‘like Musonius Rufus; for the young Phrygian slave, Epictetus, whom Titus took compassion on and sometimes brings to our rooms, has told me much about his Stoic lectures. But there is something--I know not what--in your advice which is higher and more cheerful than in his.’ Pomponia smiled. ‘Much that Musonius teaches is true and beautiful,’ she said; ‘but there is a diviner truth in the world than his.’