These considerations hardly served to lighten the gloom which had fallen across Fabia's life.

It was not so much the personal peril that saddened her.

All her life she had heard the ugly din of the world's wickedness pass harmlessly over her head, like a storm dashing at the doors of some secluded dwelling that shielded its inhabitants from the tempest.

But now she had come personally face to face with the demon of impurity; she had felt the fetid touch almost upon herself; and it hurt, it sickened her.

Therefore it was that the other Vestals marvelled, asking what change had come over their companion, to quench the mild sunshine of her life; and Fabia held little Livia very long and very closely in her arms, as if it were a solace to feel near her an innocent little thing "unspotted of the world." All this had happened a very few days before the breathless Agias came to inform Fabia of the plot against her nephew.