Oppressed by sad yearning and anxiety, the usually light-hearted child had again walked this evening from her tent to the lake gate, and thence, driven back by the shouts of the Thracian sentries, wandered through the whole camp to her beloved pine-tree, which had begun to supply the place of the oak beside her forest home: for the tree of the earth-goddess also afforded a convenient ascent like a stairway on its broad branches drooping to the sacrificial stones, while on the central trunk was a hiding-place invisible from below, with a comfortable back, and the beloved view over the Roman fortifications to the mountain peaks rising in the distance. The sun had set long before, and darkness gathered quickly in that region as soon as the glowing ball had vanished behind the wooded western shores of the lake. There was no moon; only a few stars were in the sky. The wind bore to her ears from the distance scattered sounds: the neighing of a horse, the rattle of a weapon, the shout of a sentinel at the gate. Oh, those guards, who also watched her here in her spacious prison, prevented her escape, her return to her people--for how much longer? Sorrow overpowered her, and she felt that tears were about to flow. But her tyrants should not see them; she would weep her fill, up above there! Bissula glided lightly up and sat so still in her hiding-place among the boughs that a belated bird--a blackbird--perched for the night, without seeing her, a few branches above her head. Then the girl saw two men step cautiously from behind corner tents, each at the end of a street running in opposite directions across the camp; they made signs to each other, gazed carefully behind and sideways, then hurried forward and met directly under the pine-tree on its northern side, so that the huge trunk completely concealed them from the camp. Bissula bent softly, softly downward: it was a man with a helmet and one unarmed; she could not distinguish their features. They began to talk, in whispers, it is true, but the listener understood many words, and she now recognized the speakers by their voices. "But I tell you, it must be this very day! He has ordered the scribe to come early tomorrow morning, with the seal. He means to change his will--to add a codicil. What good will his death do me, if he first throws the best part of his riches into that wench's lap?" The other made some reply which the girl did not hear. "Ha!--she--she can't be reached!" answered the first speaker. "That red-haired witch is under the protection of the fiends of hell." "How so?" "Why, one night lately--a deadly terror has seized me ever since when I see the brown beast--the monster's hot, loathsome breath was steaming from her open jaws into my face! She was within a hair's breadth of clutching and squeezing me to death! This very evening--just now--at supper--" "Hark, what was that," asked the other startled, "up above in the pine-tree? Didn't you hear anything?"