She gazed unflinchingly into her father’s imperious eyes, wide-set on either side of a formidable Roman nose. His return gaze was less incensed than puzzled. All his life he had been habituated to subserviency, had never met opposition, and to find it from his youngest daughter, and she a mere child, amazed him. As she faced him she appeared both resolute and tremulous. He looked her up and down from the bright blue velvety leather of her little shoes on which the gilt sole-edges and gilt laces glittered to the red flower in her brown hair. Inside her clinging red robe the soft outlines of her young shape swelled plump and healthy, yet altogether she seemed to him but a fragile creature. Resistance from her was incredible. Perhaps this was one more of her countless whims. While he considered her meditatively he did not move his mighty arms or legs; the broad crimson stripe down his tunic rose and fell slowly above his ample paunch and vaster chest as his breath came evenly; on his short bull neck his great bullet head was as moveless as if he had been one of the painted statues that lined the walls all about. As the two regarded each other they could hear the faint splash of the fountain in the tank midway of the courtyard. Her father, a true Roman to his marrow, with all a Roman’s arbitrary instincts, reverted to the direct attack. “You will marry Pulfennius Calvaster,” he commanded. “I will not!” she declared. He temporized. “Why not?” he queried. The obstinacy faded from Brinnaria’s handsome, regular face. She looked merely reflective. “In the first place,” she said, “because I despise him and hate him worse than any young man I ever knew; I would not marry Calvaster if he were the only man left alive. In the second place, because, if all the men on earth were courting me at once, all rich and all fascinating and Caius were poor and anything and everything else that he isn’t, I’d marry nobody ever except Caius. You hear me, Father. Caius Segontius Almo is the only, only man I’ll ever marry. Nothing can shake my resolution, never.” She was breathing eagerly, her cheeks flushed a warm red through her olive complexion, her eyes shining till tiny specks sparkled green and yellow in the wide brown of her big irises. Her father’s jaw set.