Wrapping their cloaks about them as a protection from the rain, Gyges and Aldo left the house. At the Porta Capena they separated, the master taking the Via Appia, the road that led to Albanum. He went directly to Alcmaeon’s house. The door had been left partly open. As Gyges entered, he felt the key in the lock on the outside, as it had been left by Hera. With a spark from the embers in the fireplace he lit a lamp. The house was as dreary as a tenantless cave. He felt some satisfaction at the prospect of destroying Gannon’s message; but he could not find the tunic. In a flash he concluded that Psyche had confessed. He felt as if a breath from an unfathomable abyss had breathed upon his soul. “She is lost forever!” he groaned aloud. As if incapable of further reasoning, he unconsciously extinguished the lamp, locked the door, hid the key, and went on his way towards Albanum, with a heart completely crushed. Chapter XI On the border of a desert where vegetation struggles against the arid breath of sterility, appear smiling and restful oases. But these oases perish, one by one, with the drying up of the life-giving springs. When the flame of an untempered summer burns out life, when the brackish water sinks in the wells under the spade of anxious man, when all the emerald isles of the desert vanish until one only is left, there arises in that one, amid the cries of overwhelming despair, a fervent prayer for help and protection. Such was the life of Agrippina,[2] the solitary grandchild of the Divine Augustus. The early springtime of her life was filled with sunshine and the blossoms of happiness. Her mother, Julia, was the proud daughter and only child of Augustus. Her father, Agrippa, was the greatest general of his day, and a man of noble character. She had three brothers and one sister. All were smiled upon by Fortune, and all were loved by Augustus and the Roman people. When her father died, Augustus, still living, watched over her and her family. Her widowed mother then married Tiberius. The entrance of this man into the Julian family was the ominous cloud that first veiled the effulgence of her springtime. She had married Germanicus, the son of Drusus, and brother of Claudius and Livilla. He was the noblest endowed, both in body and mind, of any Roman of that day. He was a man of handsome appearance, of extraordinary courage, of wonderful oratorical talents, and of powerful influence. Happy in the possession of the love of this best of men, the life of Agrippina was as beautiful and joyous as a perfect day in spring. Suddenly, in the clear day of her life, her brother Caius was murdered in Lycia. Eighteen months later another brother, Lucius, was murdered in Marseilles. Shortly after, her mother was exiled to the island of Pandataria, and her sister to another island, Trimetus. When her mother left Rome, Tiberius crawled from his vile nest at Rhodes, and braving the insult and opprobrium of the people, came back to the city.