"Here?
He, a man sick unto death ?" "Certainly; here!" broke in a strange voice; and forth from behind a pillar stepped Publius Gabinius, all pomaded and rouged, dressed only in a gauzy, many-folded scarlet _synthesis_.[108] [108] The "dinner coat" of the Romans.
Fabia gave a scream and sprang back in instinctive alarm.

In the twinkling of an eye it flashed over her that for some purpose or other she had been trapped.

Gabinius she knew barely by sight; but his reputation had come to her ears, and fame spoke nothing good of him.
Yet even at the moment when she felt herself in the most imminent personal peril, the inbred dignity and composed hauteur of the Vestal did not desert her.

At the selfsame instant that she said to herself, "Can I escape through the atrium before they can stop me ?" recovering from her first surprise, and with never a quiver of eyelash or a paling of cheek, she was saying aloud, in a tone cold as ice, "And indeed, most excellent Gabinius, you must pardon me for being startled; for all that I know of you tells me that you are likely to find a sombre Vestal sorry enough company." Gabinius had been counting coolly on a very noisy scene, one of a kind he was fairly familiar with--an abundance of screaming, expostulation, tearing of hair, and other manifestations of feminine agony--to be followed, of course, by ultimate submission to the will of all-dominant man.

He was not accustomed to have a woman look him fairly in the eye and speak in tones, not of bootless fury, but of superior scorn.