Her gaze fixed on the Suburan as this thought broke upon her slow brain. Her brows knitted slightly, and her eyes seemed to contract and congeal, for a moment, into lifeless glassy balls. She had a manner of meeting bitter trouble, as it were, with a motionless, voiceless, passive numbness. It resembled the action of some animals and reptiles when seized in the grip of a ferocious enemy. The functions of body and brain seemed withdrawn into an impenetrable inner casket, leaving all else relaxed, lifeless, and torpid. It is the supreme effort to resist exquisite torture, this power of self‐paralysation, this contraction of all sense into the numbness of oblivion; whilst to the beholder the spectacle of mute suffering is the most heartrending of all. Cestus, without further delay, began the same narrative he had already related to Masthlion. Tibia sat like a carven image, with her hands clenched in her lap and her head half bowed. Once only during the recital she started slightly, when she heard the noble parentage of the child she had tended, and she gave a swift, half‐startled glance, first at Cestus, and then at her husband. When the end came and the speaker’s voice ceased, and she heard the decree that Neæra was to be given up to her own people, her fingers twitched nervously for a time. ‘This, then, is what has haunted thee and darkened the house!’ she cried out sharply to her husband, as she threw her apron over her head. The anguish of her glance cut the potter to the heart. A silence fell on the room for a minute. Masthlion could not summon a word, and Cestus swung uneasily on his stool. Then the latter cleared his throat and tried to smooth matters, with arguments already familiar to the reader. ‘Why, Tibia, you have tended the child till she has become like your own, and it is hard, I admit, to hear she must leave you. But consider, she was bound to go, for the Centurion will marry her and take her away to Rome, at all events. Why trouble them? The only way, if you cannot abide without being near her, is to go after her. I have already told Masthlion this, with all the common sense one can be capable of, and shown him how it is the best place for employment in all his work.’ ‘I have already agreed; if Tibia is willing we will go to the great city,’ said Masthlion.