Agrippa stroked his smooth chin and Flaccus shot an amused glance at him. Meanwhile the girl had opened her arms to Cypros. The children, one by one, greeted her. The alabarch went on.
"My sons are no longer with us," he said. "They are abroad in the world, preparing themselves to be greater men than their father. But go, be refreshed; it shall be an evening of rejoicing. Lydia, be my right hand and give my guests comfort."
He bowed the Herod and his family out of the chamber and they followed the girl to various apartments for rest and change of raiment.
"No; I thank thee; I shall return to my house and prepare for thy hospitality. But tell me this: what does Agrippa here?"
"Put him off until you have consulted me. He is not a safe borrower."
Agrippa emerged at sunset from his apartment and descended to the first floor of the alabarch's mansion. The hall was vacant and each of the chambers opening off it was silent, so he wandered through the whole length of the corridor, composedly as a master in his own house. No one did he see until he reached the end of the hall, when there appeared suddenly, as if materialized out of the gloom, the brown serving-woman. The olive-green of her immense eyes glittered in the light of a reed taper she bore. She stepped aside to let him pass and proceeded to light the lamps.
Agrippa stopped to look at her, simply because she was lithe and unusual, but she continued without heeding him. On one of the lamp-bowls the palm-oil had run over and the reed ignited it; but with her bare hand the woman damped it and went her way with a running flame flickering out on the back of her hand.
"Perpol!" the prince exclaimed to himself as he rambled on. "No wonder the phenix comes to Egypt to be born."
At the end of a corridor he passed through an open door into a colonnade fronting a court-garden of extraordinary beauty. It was carpeted with sod, interlined with walks of white stone which led at every divergence to a classic Roman exedra. The awning which usually sheltered the inclosure from the sun had been rolled up and the cooling sky bent loftily over it. The inert summer airs were heavy with the scent of lotus, red lilies and spice roses which were massed in an oval bed in the center.