Mistress and slave looked anxiously over the chamber, but nothing unseemly greeted their eyes. Junia sank back on her couch, not now so recumbent, but at ease.
"Go fetch the Jew," she said, the languor of her manner combatted by the fire in her eyes.
A moment later Marsyas appeared in the archway.
She arose and came to meet him. When he took her extended hands, she led him to the light of the cancelli and inspected him.
"Sit," she said, drawing him down on the divan under the casement. "And speak first. Only a word, so I may see if the prologue is indeed as tragic as the mask."
"Let the mask suffice," he answered, "the prologue might be insufferable."
"_Proh pudor_! Thy friend the Herod hath just been here with pagan oaths upon his lips about thy dullness. I tell thee it is hard enough to make him walk as he should, but a groaning comrade is a gravel in his shoe. If thou wouldst manage him, be merry. Remember we have this Herod to crown, though he stood on the Tarpeian Rock and sang sonnets in dishonor of Cæsar."
"By the certainty of Death, I have," he said sententiously.
She looked at him and waited for him to go on, but he seemed to forget her, in his preoccupation.
"I am a generous woman, Marsyas," she said softly. "I do not resent thy lack of confidence in me!"
"Nay!" he exclaimed. "My lack of confidence, lady? What meanest thou?"
"In thy bosom, gentle sir, thou keepest thine own counsel, and wearest signals of thy self-containment on thy brow. Wherefore, I am informed thou hast thoughts that I may not know!"
"But I spare thee my sorrows, my cynicism, my hopelessness," he protested earnestly, "my disbelief in humankind."
"O Marsyas, wert thou not Jewish, I should call thee unmanly. Listen!" She laid a warm hand, colored like a primrose, upon his.
"Thou wast an anchorite; thou didst attain manhood's stature and mind as an anchorite; into the world thou camest with all an anchorite's slander of the poor world in thee. The eye is a spaniel; the tyrant Prejudice controls even its images. I warned thee in Alexandria. I confess that there is evil in the world, but it is more the work of an elementary impulse rather than calculation. Flaccus is bad, but because he is in love. Agrippa does foolhardy things, because he is ambitious. What? Did the preachment afflict thee which I delivered the other day upon thy levity and riotous living?"