‘Neæra,’ she said, ‘I have lost my husband, and now the gods will that you shall be taken from me. I have tended you, watched you, and loved you like a mother; but—but, Neæra, we never thought the time would come, nor yet the need to tell you that—that you are not our child. For I have been a barren stock—I never bore a child into the world.’ They sat looking at each other. Tibia, with a pleading, timid expression in her meek eyes, which the tender‐hearted girl could not withstand, despite her speechless incredulity and wonder. She thought for the moment that the dame’s sufferings had, perhaps, deranged her faculties, and then, as with a sudden and swift ray of light, her mind recalled one or two circumstances which had puzzled her strangely hitherto. She remembered on that day just as Cestus first appeared in the workshop at home, when addressing the potter as father, he replied in the negative with all the evidences of powerful emotion. Nothing had been ever added in explanation, and the hasty disavowal of relationship had presently sunk out of active speculation beneath other matters, and had been thought of no more. Again, the frantic words of Martialis, as he was hurried away from the presence of Caesar, had been wild and inexplicable to her ears at the moment of their utterance, but, in the agony of her thoughts, they had also fallen unheeded. What did it all mean? ‘I—not your child, mother,’ she said slowly. ‘Do you know what you are saying? You are forgetting—alas, this cruel trouble—it has been too much for you to bear!’ ‘I know what you mean, child, but it is not so,’ returned Tibia, in a low voice; ‘it is true, indeed, I never was a mother. You were brought to us a little thing—a very little thing—by Cestus, my brother, for safe‐keeping. We never saw or heard of him again till this present visit. We thought he must be dead, and that you, therefore, would never be claimed; so we looked upon you as our own, and never allowed you to know otherwise. What else could we have done? He told us you were an orphan—a poor man’s child—without kith or kin. Now he has come to claim you. Your grandfather is here now in this great house. He is neither poor nor mean. He is a great and wealthy nobleman, and you a great lady. Alas, we did not know—Cestus has done a wicked thing; but idle and evil he ever was from a boy in our father’s cottage.’