It shone upon the young Virgilia and Martius,
standing before her, and upon the heavier figure of the lawyer,
Aurelius Lucanus, just behind them.
Then Virgilia spoke, and her voice was as clear as the sun-down bell
which had just rung out its warning from Caesar's Hill.
"I, too, am a Christian."
With a sharp outcry, Claudia, dragging her white draperies on the
ground, disappeared in her small room, opening by a long window from
the gallery bordering on the garden. She was seen no more that night.
Silently, the lawyer and his son and daughter ate their evening meal,
reclining on the triclinium in the long room tinted in Pompeian red, a
frieze three feet in width ran around the walls. Small, chubby
cherubs, or cupids doing the work of men, weaving draperies, preparing
food, chopping meat, plucking grapes and carrying them away in
miniature wheelbarrows, were faithfully portrayed in rich colors. Some
of these frescoes, tints as vivid as when they were laid on by the
artists of twenty centuries ago, remain to this day on the walls of
ancient Roman dwellings, and enable us to know how people lived in
those far-off times.
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