th 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 w