The moon rose higher and its rays no longer struck on our faces, but, striking through the open panel, diffused from what part of the cushion or sides of the coach they fell on directly, lit up the whole interior with a pearly glimmer. By this subdued light Vedia looked bewitchingly charming and coquettish, all the more because of the contrast between her elaborate coiffure and the simple costume her maid had worn. I ate liberally and with relish and she appeared to enjoy her food as I did. "You don't seem a bit worried," I remarked, "over the loss of your jewels." "Loss!" she exclaimed. "I haven't lost them, they are all in the secret compartment under us inside the coach body, just where Lydia put them before we left Rome. The bandits had barely begun to ransack the coach when we heard the yells of the constabulary and then the hoof-beats of their horses. They and their horses made so much noise that the brigands thought they had to do with a hundred or more and fled, dragging off Bambilio and Lydia and leaving me and the hampers, even the wine-skins. They never were near laying hands on those jewels. They had Bambilio's coin-chests, to be sure; but not my jewelry nor so much as a nugget of the bullion they had expected. They were preparing to torture the procurator to make him reveal the hiding place of his bullion, when the yelling and galloping horsemen scared them away." I congratulated her and we ate with 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.