Page:The Song of the Sirens.djvu/84

 spoke with heat. Her girlish companions had never been able to elicit from her any warmth of utterance except when she enunciated to them her favorite aphorism that a woman should not find fault with her husband, that any woman should be glad to be married and that the sort of man made little difference. Even this pet doctrine she had maintained but tepidly. So also to Iarbas she spoke mildly.

As he stood mute she repeated, tonelessly.

"For what then are you a day too late?"

"To avenge her and myself," Iarbas answered fiercely. "To reach him, to kill him."

"Aeneas?" Anna exclaimed. "You thought you could? Why did you think you could?"

"You must have known, Dido must have known, anybody must have known, that I had spies in Carthage," Iarbas began apologetically. "I have had many and I have been well served. They learnt his habits and informed me. The man was very thoughtless, very heedless or very reckless."

"Aeneas!" Anna interjected, "call it entirely self-reliant." "So be it, if you please," Iarbas consented. "Call it what you choose. At any rate, according to the reports I received, he never varied his day's routine.

"About an hour after sunrise Achates drove