'The sun is hot for the poor flowers,' said she, 'to-day and they will miss me; for I have been ill lately, and it is nine days since I visited them.' 'Ill, Nydia!--yet your cheek has more color than it had last year.' 'I am often ailing,' said the blind girl, touchingly; 'and as I grow up I grieve more that I am blind.

But now to the flowers!' So saying, she made a slight reverence with her head, and passing into the viridarium, busied herself with watering the flowers.
'Poor Nydia,' thought Glaucus, gazing on her; 'thine is a hard doom! Thou seest not the earth--nor the sun--nor the ocean--nor the stars--above all, thou canst not behold Ione.' At that last thought his mind flew back to the past evening, and was a second time disturbed in its reveries by the entrance of Clodius.

It was a proof how much a single evening had sufficed to increase and to refine the love of the Athenian for Ione, that whereas he had confided to Clodius the secret of his first interview with her, and the effect it had produced on him, he now felt an invincible aversion even to mention to him her name.

He had seen Ione, bright, pure, unsullied, in the midst of the gayest and most profligate gallants of Pompeii, charming rather than awing the boldest into respect, and changing the very nature of the most sensual and the least ideal--as by her intellectual and refining spells she reversed the fable of Circe, and converted the animals into men.

They who could not understand her soul were made spiritual, as it were, by the magic of her beauty--they who had no heart for poetry had ears, at least, for the melody of her voice.