True, the thought weighed heavily upon her heart as soon as she was captured that she herself was solely to blame for her misfortune. If she had obeyed the well-meant counsel--she was on the verge of tears; experience had taught the value of the advice--she would now have been safe and sheltered with her grandmother, though also with Adalo. And owing him a debt of gratitude! She crushed the tears on her long lashes. No, she would not admit that he was right. Now she owed the haughty Adeling nothing: that was certainly an advantage. "And"--she shook her waving locks back defiantly--"they won't eat me here! Only don't be afraid, Bissula," she said to herself; "and don't submit to anything!" She had trembled only a moment after her escape from Herculanus, when her powerful deliverer measured her whole dainty figure with a look under which she lowered her eyes in confusion. But when she again raised those innocent child-eyes, the expression had vanished. And it never returned. Her master allowed her to spend the whole day with her "Father Ausonius": only when it grew dark he appeared, with inexorable firmness, to take her away; and he went with her himself to the tent assigned to her, before which he stationed one of his Illyrian countrymen as a sentinel all night. Bissula never saw her friend's nephew, whom she feared, alone. She confidently expected the restoration of her liberty when the camp should be broken up and the Romans should withdraw from the country. There would be no fighting, Ausonius repeatedly told her. So the light-hearted girl regarded her captivity, which had lost all its terrors, as an adventure that afforded her an opportunity for the conversations with her friend which she had missed so long. Many of her young playmates had lived as hostages and probably as captives in Roman camps and in the fortresses on the southern shore, and been restored to liberty uninjured when truce or peace was declared. That she could be detained or carried away against her will she did not fear: the most powerful man in the camp was her protector. Yet this peril constantly threatened her more and more closely. Ausonius kept a sort of diary, in which before going to sleep he recorded events, impressions, sketches of poems, and short bits of verse--a custom whose regular observance he scarcely omitted even in camp. A touch of pedantry was one of his characteristics. Yet the diary was not a monologue, rather a sort of dialogue; for he addressed it in the form of a letter to his oldest and most intimate friend, Arius Paulus of Bigerri, rhetorician, but also an old soldier. Every three months he collected what he had written and forwarded it to him to receive his criticisms and answers on the margin of the manuscript when returned. So, during these days of involuntary leisure he wrote. CHAPTER XXIII. V. BEFORE THE KALENDS OF SEPTEMBER. Ausonius sends greetings to his Paulus.