made clawing motions with my hands and feet, the leopard
responded to my suggestion, capered again as before and, when close to me,
lay down before me on the pavement and began to paw at me, purring loudly
in her throat, now and then snarling softly. She played with me as she had
often played before, all her claws sheathed and her paws soft as
thistledown; mumbling my hands and forearms in her hot mouth, slavering
over them, yet never so much as bruising the skin with her needle-sharp
teeth. Yet I seemed to detect a subtle difference in her mood and, from
moment to moment, dreaded that she might claw me to ribbons or sink her
fangs in my shoulders or face.

All the while she was mouthing, pawing and kicking me I was raging at
Agathemer for having put me in a position where I had to make so
undignified an exhibition of myself before such an assemblage.

Presently I recognized that alteration in her mood which made it possible
for me to rise, take her by the scruff of the neck, and lead her off to
her cage.

When I had her inside I realized how hot, sweaty, dusty tousled, rumpled
and mussed I was. Her cage was under the vaulted arcade beneath the second
terrace. I was, when I shot its bolts, altogether out of sight of Vedia,
Nemestronia and the other noble ladies who had been spectators of my
tussle with the leopard. I did not want them to see me again in my
dishevelled and dirty condition: I sneaked into the house by the passage
from the arcade into the cellars and up the scullery stairs, made the
first slave I saw escort me to the guest-room I usually occupied when at
Nemestronia's and bade him summon bath-attendants and dressers.
Nemestronia had a store-room lined with wardrobes of men's attire
containing every sort of garment of every style and size. I was soon clean
and clad as a gentleman should be in a fresh tunic and in the garment I
had left in the water-garden, which a footman had fetched for me.

Then I went out on the upper terrace.

There I found the nine ladies, with some maids and waiters. Before the
ladies, facing Nemestronia, stood Agathemer; behind and about him
Nemestronia's six big, husky, bull-necked slave-lashers, the two head-
lashers with their many-lashed scourges.

I realized at once what had happened. Nemestronia had needed no one to
inform her that it was through Agathemer's negligence or mismanagement
that the leopard had escaped from the wild-garden. She had not waited to
ask me to inv