When they rose from table, Lucilia, Octavia, and the betrothed couple went to walk up and down the peristyle, and Titus Claudius went to his daughter’s room. It was not without an uneasy feeling about his heart, that he desired the slave-girl who sat outside the door to raise the curtain, and he felt sad enough as he entered the room, which was one of the prettiest and pleasantest in the house. Claudia had made it a charming retreat for her studies and favorite pursuits. To the right lay the apartment she shared with Lucilia; but here she alone was mistress, and everything in the room seemed to have taken the stamp of her individuality. The unpretentious and tasteful furniture seemed to proclaim her frank simplicity. On the wall hung her gilt cithara with its red ribbon, the confidant of her hopes and dreams. There lay her favorite authors neatly arranged in ivory cases,[65] the Greeks to the left, the Latins to the right--above all Homer, Sophocles, and the odes of Sappho. There were a few costly vases of sardonyx, statuettes in Parian marble, and in a purple-lined niche a head of Jupiter, copied from the world-famed work of Phidias.[66] There were too a silver-mounted spindle and a small hand-loom, besides all sorts of toys and baubles, such as young people were wont to give and receive during the Saturnalia. In short, the pretty bower betrayed itself in every detail as the retreat of a bright-natured, busy and happy girl. And now? But what was the priest’s surprise when, instead of the crushed and weeping child he expected to meet, Claudia came towards him with gentle pride, grave, but mistress of herself, calm and almost radiant with a half-sad, but half-happy confidence.