"The sage can extract enjoyment from the blackest melancholy, as bees of Hymettus make their best honey with the juice of bitterest plants!" and his gossip soothed Arsinoë, who smilingly used to call Anatolius her physician. In reality she became stronger, but never returned to her studio. The sight of chips of marble filled her with painful memories. Meanwhile, at the time of which we are speaking Hortensius was preparing wonderful public games in the Flavian Theatre, in honour of his arrival in Rome. He was continually travelling, and busy receiving horses, lions, bears, Scots wolf-dogs, crocodiles from the tropics, and with these, flocks of intrepid hunters, skilled riders, comedians, and gladiators. The date of the performance was approaching, and the lions had not arrived from Tarentum, where they had disembarked. The bears had grown thin, famished, timid as lambs. Hortensius became sleepless with anxiety. Two days before the festival, the gladiators, Saxon prisoners, proud and fearless men for whom he had paid a colossal sum, considering it a disgrace to serve as a sport for the Roman populace, committed suicide by cutting their own throats at night in their prison. Hortensius, at that unexpected news, nearly went out of his mind. Now all hope concentrated itself on the crocodiles, which excited the special curiosity of the mob. "Have you tried giving them newly-killed hogs' flesh?" demanded the senator of the slave entrusted with the supervision of these precious beasts. "Yes; but they won't eat it." "Have you tried veal?" "They won't touch that, either." "And wheaten bread soaked in cream?" "They turn away from it and go to sleep." "They must be ill or too fatigued." "We've even opened their jaws and shoved the food down their throats. They cough it up again." "Ah! by Jupiter, those foul beasts will be the death of me! We must release them after the first day in the arena or else they will die of hunger," groaned Hortensius falling into a chair. Arsinoë contemplated him with envy. He at least was not tired of life. She passed into an isolated chamber whence the windows looked down on the garden. There in the calm moonlight her young sister Myrrha, who was now about sixteen years old, was softly touching the strings of a harp, and the notes were falling like tears. Arsinoë kissed Myrrha, who answered her by a smile without ceasing to play. A loud whistle sounded behind the garden wall: "It is he," said Myrrha, rising. "Come quickly!" She grasped Arsinoë's hand tightly. The two young girls threw black cloaks over their shoulders and went out. The wind was chasing the clouds along, and the moon, sometimes hidden, sometimes shone out brightly. Arsinoë opened a door in the outer wall of the house. A young man wrapped in a monk's hooded mantle was awaiting them. "We are not late, Juventinus?" asked Myrrha. "I was afraid that you were not coming!"