Caesar had bent over the table, half-closed one eye, and holding before the other a round polished emerald, which he used, was looking at them.

For a moment his glance met Lygia's eyes, and the heart of the maiden was straitened with terror.

When still a child on Aulus's Sicilian estate, an old Egyptian slave had told her of dragons which occupied dens in the mountains, and it seemed to her now that all at once the greenish eye of such a monster was gazing at her.

She caught at Vinicius's hand as a frightened child would, and disconnected, quick impressions pressed into her head: Was not that he, the terrible, the all-powerful?
She had not seen him hitherto, and she thought that he looked differently.

She had imagined some kind of ghastly face, with malignity petrified in its features; now she saw a great head, fixed on a thick neck, terrible, it is true, but almost ridiculous, for from a distance it resembled the head of a child.