'To-morrow, after the ninth hour, you are bidden hither. Come if you
choose. If you do not, I shall have forgotten something I have
learnt.'
To this he paid little heed; it might have significance, it might
have none. If the morning sustained his hope, he would be able to
resist the temptation of the afternoon. So he cherished Silvia's
letter, and flung Heliodora's contemptuously aside.
Reaching Gordian's house next morning a little before the appointed
hour, he found the members of the family and one or two guests
assembled in a circular room, with a dome pierced to admit light:
marble seats, covered with cushions, rose amphitheatre-wise on one
half of the circle, and opposite was a chair for the reader. In this
hall Sidonius Apollinaris had declaimed his panegyric on the Emperor
Avitus; here the noble Boethius had been heard, and, in earlier
days, the poet Claudian. Beside Silvia stood her husband's two
sisters, Tarsilla and Aemiliana, both of whom, it had begun to be
rumoured, though still in the flower of their youth, desired to
enter the monastic life.
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