Читать книгу No. XIII; or, The Story of the Lost Vestal онлайн

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But the curtain which fell over the entrance to the dining-hall was seen to quiver as the British slave-girl disappeared behind it.

Then the lady exclaimed, “I wish Ebba would take more heed of her ways, for if she is defiled with the foreign superstitions, there will be trouble for us. There is enough trouble as it is. Ah! me, why do people make so much of religion? Jupiter or Apollo, or the Christian’s God, it is all the same to me!”

And the lady leaned back upon her pillow, and very soon the dark lashes were resting on her cheeks, and she was wrapt in a gentle slumber.

There are always people in all ages of the world of the same easy temperament as this wife of the noble Severus. The city might be deserted; the rage of a tyrannical governor might vent itself on the brave and loyal-hearted Alban, by torture and death, but what did it concern Cæcilia?

As I said, many other ladies of her rank had gone out that day to see the cruel sight, and to feast their eyes on a scene from which delicately nurtured women might have been supposed to turn with loathing. But Cæcilia, the wife of Severus, hated trouble, and looking on life as one long festival, disliked to think of anything which seemed to point to the probability, that to many it was a season of trial and suffering. So, lulled by the fountain in the atrium of her husband’s beautiful villa, she enjoyed a dreamy repose, and was unconscious of all that was passing about her, and that her little daughter had put aside the shells and also disappeared behind the curtain.