When our transports had abated a little I was aware that the twilight was deepening into dusk and that I must somehow save Vedia from the roaming wild beasts. I guided her along the twisting track from her hiding-place to the road. As we gained it I heard a loud snarl of a lion or tiger or panther far off towards the crag. We must make haste.

I reflected that it would be a very strong and enterprising beast, even if a lion, which would break into Vedia's coach when its panels were slid and fastened.

"We are too far from any habitation," I said, "for us to reach any while the light holds. I dare not make the attempt with you among all these freed wild beasts. I should be afraid to try it alone in this deepening dusk. The best thing we can do is to get inside your carriage, slide the panels and trust to them to keep out any inquisitive leopard or lion. With the carcasses of four well-fed horses and as many mules laid ready to eat, no tiger ought to be hungry enough to be eager after us."

"I had thought that, too," she agreed.

I peered through the open door into the coach, which was roomy. Then I replaced in it its mattresses and cushions, Vedia showing me how they fitted and, going round to the other door and opening it, helping me to lay smooth the unmanageable feather-stuffed upper-cushions. She also showed me the receptacles for her toilet-box, the food hampers and the kidskins. While we were thus busied the almost full moon rose clear and bright over a distant mountain. I helped Vedia into the coach and she disposed herself at full length on its cushions, sinking into the feathers. I walked round the coach and slid all the panels except the front panel through which the moonlight entered, then I climbed inside, shut and fastened the door, shut the panels, fastened each and stretched out by Vedia, like her with plenty of cushions and pillows under my head and shoulders.

As I fastened the last panels we heard the hunting-squall of a leopard at no great distance. Vedia clung to me, shuddering.

"You have saved me, Caius," she said. "As you did on the terrace at
Nemestronia's."

Naturally, for a while, we exchanged kisses and caresses without any intermingled words.

When, she spoke she said:

"How do you come to be alive?"

"That," I said, "is thanks to Agathemer and is a long tale. I am faint with hunger and thirst, you yourself should be in need of nourishment and might be the better for it. There should be food in those hampers and wine in the kidskins."

"There is," she said, "and plenty. I am as hungry and thirsty as you, now I am no longer terrified and am recovering from my panic. But I am intensely eager to hear your story. Do begin at the beginning just as soon as you can, and tell it while we eat."

Then she showed me how to dispose the hampers as they were designed to be arranged while the occupants of the coach ate. They were very generously filled with the most luxurious fare: hard-boiled eggs, ham, cold roast pork, sliced thin; breast of roast goose, breast of roast duck, young guinea-fowls, broiled whole and cut up, broiled chickens, broiled squabs; half a. dozen kinds of bread, a quarter loaf and different sorts of rolls; lettuce and radishes; bottles of oil, vinegar, garum sauce, and other sauces; salt smoked fish; figs, both big green figs and small purple figs; a jar of strained honey, several kinds of cakes, and plenty of salt, pepper, other relishes, and a lavish provision of knives and of silver, plates, spoons, cups and other utensils.

"Why all this profusion?" I queried. "You have enough here for a party of ten."

"I always have a variety like this," she explained. "I generally have very little appetite on a journey so I tell Lydia to put in all the things she can get which she knows I like. Then something is likely to tempt me."

We feasted by moonlight, while I told my story from the moment when I had received her warning letter.

"I knew that you mounted the horse in front of Plosurnia's Tavern," she said, "but I have never heard of you after that. Tanno and I did all we could to find out what had become of you; all we could without risking the secret service getting an inkling that we had a hope that you were not dead.

"In fact it was not only advertised from the Palace in due course, but circumstantially reported to us privately, that the secret service had learned that you had arranged for a fishing-vessel to take you to sea from Sipontum. They had then set three detachments of Praetorians to intercept you, one on each road, with watchers to warn them if you were recognized. You were seen or betrayed somewhere between Hadria and Auximum, one account said at Ortona, and the Praetorians killed you.

"Tanno said that the secret service always gave out such an account if they failed to locate and capture any man they should have arrested. But the confirmation of the story by three different private agencies plainly destroyed his hopes that you might still be alive. I tried to keep on hoping, but, after a whole year, I stopped lying awake and sobbing in the dark; while I felt more grief for you than I ever felt for Satronius Patavinus and more truly widowed than when he died, I ceased to grieve and regained my interest in gaieties and suitors. Don't you think that was natural?"

"Very natural," I admitted and went on with my story.

The moon rose higher and its rays no longer struck on our faces, but, striking through the open panel, diffused from what part of the cushion or sides of the coach they fell on directly, lit up the whole interior with a pearly glimmer. By this subdued light Vedia looked bewitchingly charming and coquettish, all the more because of the contrast between her elaborate coiffure and the simple costume her maid had worn.

I ate liberally and with relish and she appeared to enjoy her food as I did.

"You don't seem a bit worried," I remarked, "over the loss of your jewels."

"Loss!" she exclaimed. "I haven't lost them, they are all in the secret compartment under us inside the coach body, just where Lydia put them before we left Rome. The bandits had barely begun to ransack the coach when we heard the yells of the constabulary and then the hoof-beats of their horses. They and their horses made so much noise that the brigands thought they had to do with a hundred or more and fled, dragging off Bambilio and Lydia and leaving me and the hampers, even the wine-skins. They never were near laying hands on those jewels. They had Bambilio's coin-chests, to be sure; but not my jewelry nor so much as a nugget of the bullion they had expected. They were preparing to torture the procurator to make him reveal the hiding place of his bullion, when the yelling and galloping horsemen scared them away."

I congratulated her and we ate with even more relish. Both of us, however, were sparing of the wine, though I gloated at the savor of the first really good wine I had tasted for more than two years.

And garum sauce! I had not realized how I had craved such luxuries as garum.

I told my story to an accompaniment of Vedia's exclamations. She was amazed at all of it; at our crawl through the drain, at the loyalty of old Chryseros, at my involvement with Maternus, at my encounter with Pescennius Niger, at my involvement with the mutineers; but most of all, at my having been present in the great circus, an eyewitness of the most spectacular day of racing Commodus ever exhibited under his transparent pseudonym of Palus and his last day of public jockeying; and, equally, at Agathemer's device by which we survived the massacre.

We had finished our leisurely meal and I had finished my story, neither our appetites nor the flow of my narrative marred by the distant squalls of leopards and roars of lions, nor by the uncanny sounds made by the hyenas, when, all of a sudden, a lion uttered a powerful and prolonged roar within a dozen yards of us. Vedia shrieked and clung to me, clutching me so I had to remonstrate with her in order to be able to slide shut and fasten the open front panel. I had barely fastened it when another roar as loud, sudden, and long answered the first from the other side of us, somewhere in the swamp tract. This time Vedia did not shriek, she only clung closer to me. I held her as close as she held me and, so clinging to each other, in the pale glimmer of the moonlight striking on the shell panes in the panels, we listened to repetitions of the roars, each time nearer, till the two beasts were roaring at each other not much more than its length from the carriage, apparently facing each other across the dead pole-horses. I expected a fight, but they ceased roaring, and, by the sounds they made, fell to gorging themselves on horse-meat.

When we had become used to their proximity, since, after a lapse of time which seemed like half an hour or more, they kept on crunching and rending without any roarings and without coming nearer the carriage, Vedia, her arms still about me, told me the story of her doings since my downfall. Most of it was taken up with social gaieties and with rejections of tolerated suitors.

Then she, shyly, told me of her liking for Orensius Pacullus, of Aquileia, and her promise to marry him. She explained at length why she had been called imperatively to Aquileia, why he felt bound to remain there and how it was that she had agreed to travel to Aquileia to be married there, instead of his returning to Rome, which would have been the most conventional arrangement.

While she was telling me this we heard not only the noise of the feeding of the two lions which were eating the dead horses, but heard also a third animal as noisily tearing at one of the dead mules behind the coach.

"I cannot believe," she said, "that I ever consented to marry anybody else, even when I was certain you were dead. But you know, Caius, it is natural to be married; and to live alone, as maid or widow, is not only lonesome and unnatural, but unfashionable and absurd.

"But, now that I know you are alive, I shall not care who thinks me ridiculous or who calls me silly; I shall feel lonely, but lonely merely because I cannot live with you. I shall jilt poor dear Pacullus, who is as good a man and as good a fellow as ever lived, and I shall stick to my widowhood until I die or Commodus joins the company of the gods and we can arrange for your full rehabilitation and the restoration of your estates and rank."

Just as she said this we distinctly heard clawing and snuffing against the panels behind our heads, opposite where the lions were feasting. Vedia did not shriek, she was too scared to make any sound: she merely clutched me closer.

Both lions roared in front of the coach; a tiger's rasping yarr answered from behind it and almost instantly there were noises alongside the coach indicating that a lion and tiger were at grips; growls, snarls, more growls and more snarls, each choked off in the middle as it were, half swallowed and left unfinished. For some reason the noise of the fight immediately started a chorus of hyenas, emitting their strange cries, much like human laughter, but the laughter of maniacs. Our situation and environment was to the last degree uncanny.

The fight lasted no long time. We could not conjecture which combatant was victorious, but they dashed off, one pursuing the other. The remaining lion roared twice; long, choking, snarling torrents of thunderous noise; then it also went away. Except for distant snarls, squalls and roars, we were in a silent moonlit world, almost peaceful. I ventured to unfasten the other front panel and slide it a little way open. The rays of the high moon, poured in on our feet, we looked out on a magical prospect.

Vedia put a relishing warm arm round my neck.

"Call me Caia again," she whispered. "Where you are Caius I am Caia!"
[Footnote: From the Roman marriage-ritual.] The implication thrilled me.
It was as if we were married, had been man and wife for long past.

It may have been midnight, was near midnight when she said:

"I don't want to go to sleep at all. We can do without one night's sleep. We can sleep tomorrow night, when we are not together. Let's try to keep awake every minute till daylight."

In fact it was not easy to sleep, for a pack of hyenas, apparently as friendly with each other as if they had hunted together since they were weaned, came and picked the bones of the horses and mules, even ate the bones, which cracked loudly between their powerful jaws. The noise of their gluttony would have kept awake a pair sleepier than we.

But, when the moon was almost half way down the sky, when the roars and squalls and snarls of lions and leopards and tigers and the horrid laughter of hyenas had ceased to sound, when the night silence was so complete that we could hear the cocks crowing near distant farmsteads and the faint breezes rustling in the willows, we did sleep, she first, her arms round me and her head on my shoulder.

When we woke, with the slanted moon rays on the back corner of the coach behind me, she cuddled to me luxuriously, patted me and presently whispered, in a bantering, roguish tone which I detected even in her softest whisper:

"You remember that old sweetheart of yours?"

"I don't remember any sweetheart except you," I retorted. "I never had any sweetheart except you."

"I mean," she said, "that minx who made eyes at you and all your country neighbors and certainly tried to marry you and most of your Sabine friends."

"You mean Marcia?" said I.

"Ah," she said, playfully and teasingly, "I thought you would remember her name. If you remember her name you must remember her."

"Of course I remember Marcia," I said. "How could I forget her after the way she led my uncle by the nose, had half the countryside mad for her, set us all by the ears, rebuffed Ducconius Furfur, and married Marcus Martius?

"If I had never known her before I'd be bound to recall the creature who embroiled me with you. My! You were in a wax!"

"I certainly was," she whispered, "and I thought I had reason to be indignant. But now I believe your version of her relations with you and feel no qualms at recollecting the slanders I then credited. But, the point is, you remember her."

"My dear," I said, "if I had never set eyes on Marcia except when I encountered her in the Baths of Titus the day you rescued me from drowning when I fainted in the swimming pool, I'd remember her for life. She is too beautiful to forget."

"Am I so hideous?" she demanded.

"You are the loveliest woman alive," I vowed. "But Marcia is amazingly spectacular and the pictures she makes impress themselves on one's memory and eyesight. I could never forget her in that brilliant tableau on the camp-platform facing the mutineers, even if I had never seen her before."

"I was coming to that," Vedia said. "Marcia, who was a foundling and a slave as the adopted child of a slave, has risen so high that she is truly Empress in all but the official title. She has all the honors Faustina or Crispina ever had, except that she keeps out of those religious rites, participation in which is confined to women married with the full old-time ceremonies and observances."

I then told her what Agathemer and I had heard about Marcia while domiciled with Colgius, and of the absence from all talk about her of any mention of or allusion to Marcus Martius; I asked if she knew what had become of him or, indeed, anything about him.

"Oh, yes," she said, "all Roman society knew the main facts and dear old Tanno supplied me with many of the intimate details. Commodus made a point of having Martius specially presented to him because he had heard that he had been, with you and Tanno, one of the foremost fighters in your affrays in Vediamnum and near Villa Satronia. At his private audience he congratulated and bepraised Martius and acclaimed his prowess. Martius, who seems to have been a very fine fellow, disclaimed any pretensions to such laudations and modestly stated that he had, at the beginning of each fight, been far in the rear in your travelling-coach, with Marcia; that she had clung to him and so delayed his getting out; that each time he had gotten out and picked up the staff of a disabled combatant, but that, in each combat, he had arrived barely in time to land a few blows on some of the routed enemy; that in neither affray had he done any real fighting or been in any danger or performed any exploits.

"Commodus, in his blunt way, had asked whether he was good for anything, anyhow. Martius had replied that he was considered more than a mediocre horse-master.

"Commodus had then invited him to demonstrate his prowess in the Stadium of the Palace. There Martius had shown such skill, courage, agility, judgment, grace and ease that Commodus was delighted. He had Martius ride a number of wild, fierce and unmanageable horses and was more and more charmed with him.

"Next day he had another batch of intractable mounts for him. As Martius was manoeuvring one which he had almost subdued Commodus stepped too near the plunging brute and, in saving the Emperor from being run down and trampled, Martius was somehow thrown and his neck broken.

"Commodus was very penitent, felt that he had caused Martius' death, had him given a funeral of Imperial magnificence and, as soon as her grief had quieted enough, paid Marcia a ceremonial visit of condolence, as if she had been the widow of a full general killed in battle on the frontier.

"One sight of Marcia was enough. Within a very short space of time her wiles had ensnared him and Crispina raged in vain."

Then she told me all the story of the intrigues by which Marcia poisoned the Emperor's mind against the Empress, until Crispina fell under all sorts of suspicion in the eyes of Commodus: of how at the same time Marcia subtly laid snares for Crispina and enticed her into injudicious behavior with several gallants, until finally the Emperor put her under surveillance, later relegated her to Capri, then to some more distant island, and finally had her brought back to Rome, publicly tried, convicted and executed.

I told her my conjectures as to the queer outcome of the arrest of Ducconius Furfur and as to who Palus really was and who occupied the throne while Palus exhibited himself as wrestler, boxer, charioteer and what not.

"I know nothing to confirm your surmises," she said, "but we about the Court have often been puzzled at the way Commodus appeared to be in two places at once. You set me thinking."

After the second cockcrow, since dawn was not now far away, we fell to talking of the future.

"I shan't marry anybody, ever, except you, dear!" she promised, without my asking it and again and again: "I'll remain a widow until I die unless we outlive Commodus, and Tanno and I succeed in having you rehabilitated. I have many consolations in my wealth and social position and friends."

"And suitors," I put in, mimicking her tone when she bantered me about
Marcia.

"And suitors!" she replied. "Caius, I love you, and I'll never marry anyone else, but I do love attention. I love to keep a dozen good catches dangling about me; their wooings and their gifts and their behavior generally are no end of good fun. And it's good fun to have half the marriageable belles furious with me. I cannot help encouraging any man, or even lad, who moons about after me. But you have never had any reason to be jealous, you have none now, you never will have."

I expressed my faith in her the best I could.

"You are a dear, dear boy," she said, "and it is good of you not to be jealous, even when you have so little reason to be jealous. I have much more. Suppose I raged about Nebris or Septima?"

I tried to change the subject and succeeded, when I suggested that we must plan what we were to do at dawn and in the future. After a full discussion and the airing of her ideas and mine, we agreed that there was little or no likelihood of the road-constables returning or of anyone else approaching her carriage before full daylight. As soon as there was sufficient light for it to be safe, I would open the panels enough for us to keep watch up and down the highway and in the direction the constables had taken. When we saw them returning I was to wait till they were near enough to assure her safety and then, at the last moment, I was to slip out on the other side of the coach. That was next the swamp and I could be out of sight among the willows and alders when less than two score yards from the road; also I knew the path across the swamp and could cross it and go off home through the meadows and pastures beyond it. This was our plan.

She said she would, whenever the road-constables returned, behave as if she had been alone in the coach all night. She had no doubt that the police would give her every assistance in their power.

"Of course," she said, "my intendant galloped off somewhere, somehow and the coachman and outrider and mule-drivers ran away; you couldn't expect any or all of them to make a stand against all those armed brigands. If the constables return, as they will, all my men will come back. Osdarus will manage to get me horses from the nearest change-station or somewhere else, somehow. Once at an inn I can get fresh horses. I can buy a team at Nuceria."

"Can you pay for a team?" I interrupted. "Have you the cash?"

"My gold and silver," she laughed, "are in the other secret compartment. The outlaws did not get my coin any more than my jewelry. Why look! Lydia's earrings are in my ears now and her necklace round my neck and her bracelets on my wrists and her rings on my fingers. The rascals were so sure of not being interfered with and so much at ease that they were startled frantic by the galloping horsemen and scuttled off with Bambilio's coin-chest, dragging him and poor Lydia and totally forgetting me, thinking me the maid, not even noticing these little trinkets, which are mostly silver and some of gold and so worth stealing.

"I have the cash to pay for two teams or three: I brought plenty for the journey to Aquileia, because we could learn little of the state of the roads beyond Bononia and I thought I might have to travel by Placentia or even by Milan. I'll get back to Rome, as fast as I can. I don't want to be married now, so I don't want to go on to Bononia, let alone all the way to Aquileia. If I did want to go on, the bandits have run off with my maid, and I could hardly get along without her, and they have also removed my escort, and I certainly could not keep on without a proper escort. I have every excuse for turning about at once and making haste to get out of this dangerous neighborhood and getting back home.

"Poor Lydia! I hate to think of her at the mercy of those brutal ruffians. They may maltreat her horribly if they discover that they have the maid instead of the mistress, and by the maid's device. I'll tell everybody I see that I'll pay any ransom in reason, even beyond reason, for poor Lydia, if the brigands will restore her to me safe and sound. I fancy their friends hereabouts, and almost every inhabitant of the district is a friend of theirs, by your account, will speedily have conveyed to them the news that their capture is worth almost as much ransom as they hoped to extort for me. That news ought to protect Lydia while she is among the outlaws and ought to help me to get her back without much delay.

"As soon as I am in Rome I'll send a trusty agent up here to set on foot negotiations with the outlaws and to rescue Lydia by paying what they ask for her.

"And, the moment I reach Rome I'll set in motion all the forces I can control or enlist, and I can influence many men in high places, I'll have all I can influence working quietly and most unobtrusively for that official manumission, of yours. Once you are free you had best travel secretly and without haste to Bruttium. No folk are more secretive or more loyal than the herders and foresters of Bruttium. Not only your former slaves on your uncle's estate there, but all their neighbors will do as much to keep secret your presence among them, and shield you and to make you comfortable and happy as the Umbrians hereabouts have been doing to help and protect Bulla and his band and to shield them from the constabulary and authorities. In Bruttium you can lurk in safety as long as Commodus lives and it will even be safe for us two to exchange letters. In Bruttium it can be arranged that no secret-service agent or Imperial spy can ever get wind of your existence, let alone of your hiding-place. You can be free, in a way, housed comfortably, with no duties, able to pass your time as you please, and well cared for. Tanno and I will see that you are supplied with cash for the journey and for your needs after you reach your haven."

The cocks crowed vociferously at all the neighboring farmsteads and we could hear them plainly across the considerable distances from us to each. The moon hung low and the pale first light of day began to overcome the moonlight.

Vedia petted me and I petted her and she repeated her vows of unalterable fidelity to her pledge to marry no one else and to hope to marry me.

As dawn brightened the hyenas burst into a belated chorus and a lion roared far away. After that the beasts made no sounds which came to our ears.

Vedia insisted on my eating more of her delicacies and, I confess, I ate liberally and with relish. A night with almost no sleep and much excitement causes an unnatural hunger at dawn and the delicious rarities tempted me.

She explained, over and over, that I was to behave precisely as if we had not encountered each other and be sure not to mistake some secret-service agent for her emissary. The watchword was to be, in memory of that used at my escape from Rome, that whoever came from her or Tanno to me would ask:

"Can you direct me to the leopard-tamer who rode the horse with the blue saddle-cloth?"

I was to reply:

"The blue saddle-cloth was bordered with silver."

He was then to respond:

"I have silver for the leopard-tamer."

I was then to say:

"I am the leopard-tamer and I have a pouch for your silver."

After we had rehearsed the passwords till both were sure neither could forget or misplace a word, as the day was coming on, we kept a keen lookout through the partly opened panels. Before sunrise I saw the mounted constables approaching down the mountain trail, for there were several points on it where horsemen could be seen through the trees, even from where we were.

I unfastened the coach door next the swamp, we kissed each other again and again, and, as the horsemen came in sight away across the meadows where they emerged from the woods, we exchanged a last farewell kiss and I slipped out and across the swamp.