l 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