Junia appeared on the housetop. She came with lagging steps and sank upon the divan, gazing with sleepy eyes at Marsyas. "I emancipated myself," she said, "from the study of new stitches, the neighbor's dress and the fashion in perfumes. A pest on your rustic habit of early rising! Here we are aroused in the unlovely hours of the raw dawn to achieve business, ere the sun bakes us into stupidity at midday!" "A needless sacrifice to these Egyptians," Agrippa declared. "They are all salamanders. I saw a serving-woman in this house pick up a flame on her bare palm and carry it off as one would bear a vase." "Vasti? Nay, but she comes from India; fled from servitude to the Brahmin priesthood to take service with the man who had pitied her once." "The alabarch?" "Even so. He bought the gold and onyx plates that he put on the Temple gates, in India, where he saw her and pitied her. So, she fled her owner and sought the world over till she found the alabarch to enslave herself anew." "So! Small wonder, then, she is annealed like an amphora. Yet I had believed she was a bayadere." "A bayadere?" Junia repeated. "A Brahmin dancer, having the peculiarities of an Egyptian almah, a Greek hetaera, and a Pythian priestess, all fused in one. But now that she hath repented, she is rigidly upright and a relentless pursuer of evil-doers." "Alas!" sighed Junia, still watching Marsyas, "is it not enough to grow old without having to become virtuous?" Agrippa lifted his eyes to her face, and the look was sufficient comment. But Marsyas had been plunged in his own thoughts and did not hear. "What is the Feast of Flora?" he asked. The Roman woman smiled and answered. "A popular expression of the world's joy over the summer. That was its original motive, but it has been conventionalized into a feast formally celebrating the reign of Flora. It was pastoral, but the poor cities walled away from the wheat and the pastures adopted it, in very hunger for the feel of the earth. It falls in the spring under the revivifying influence of awakening life and the loosed spirit of the populace grows boisterous. We become a city of rustics and hoidens. Pleasure is the purpose and love the largess of the occasion." Agrippa smiled absently. These two remarks of diverse character were tentative. She was sounding Marsyas' nature. "I shall not sail till it is done," Agrippa declared. "A rare diversion to tempt a man from his ambitions," the young Essene retorted quickly. Junia had made her sounding. She persisted in her latter role.