risk of your father having to march away to the wars. I know that
if I were your father I would take you back. He says that his villa
there is exactly like this, and you have many relations there,
and there must be all sorts of pleasures and grand spectacles far
beyond anything there is here. I am sure it would be better for
you, and happier."

"I thought that you would be quite sorry," she said gravely.

"So I shall be very sorry for myself," Beric said; "as, next to
my own mother, there is no one I care for so much as you and your
father. I shall miss you terribly; but yet I am so sure that it
would be best for you to be at home with your own people, that I
should be glad to hear that your father was going to take you back
to Rome."

But Berenice did not altogether accept the explanation. She felt
really hurt that Beric should view even the possibility of her
going away with equanimity, and she very shortly went off to her
own apartment; while a few minutes later, Beric, after bidding
goodbye to Caius, started to rejoin Boduoc, whom he found waiting
at the edge of the forest.

That evening Berenice said to her father, "I was angry with Beric
today, father."

"Were you, child? what about?"

"I told him that perhaps in another three years, when I was sixteen,
you would take me to Rome, and that I thought, perhaps, if we went