er 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 loo