"I know nothing to confirm your surmises," she said, "but we about the Court have often been puzzled at the way Commodus appeared to be in two places at once. You set me thinking." After the second cockcrow, since dawn was not now far away, we fell to talking of the future. "I shan't marry anybody, ever, except you, dear!" she promised, without my asking it and again and again: "I'll remain a widow until I die unless we outlive Commodus, and Tanno and I succeed in having you rehabilitated. I have many consolations in my wealth and social position and friends." "And suitors," I put in, mimicking her tone when she bantered me about Marcia. "And suitors!" she replied. "Caius, I love you, and I'll never 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."