‘Fear, I am well assured, is a weakness unaccustomed to your breast,’ he said, ‘and, if I gather rightly from your words, you confess to be in subjection, no less than the rest of your sex, to the passion which they say rules feminine nature. Nevertheless I wish, on this occasion, for your own sake, fear had tempered curiosity a little.’ ‘Curiosity!’ she returned with passionate scorn; then her voice sank to its former nervous intonation. ‘And yet I said false, Martialis, when I boasted of my fearlessness. I thought I was proof,—thus far without it, and now, lo, it has found me out.’ ‘No! no!’ she continued rapidly, as he uttered some halting commonplace, ‘not business of Prefect, nor of Caesar, nor yet whim, nor curiosity, but only my heart and thee, Martialis,—Lucius! Have you not seen? Do you not see?’ ‘Plautia——’ ‘It might have been months ere Rome could see you again. The city seemed void. I loathed it. My house seemed turned to a dungeon. My occupations palled upon me. I was weary, and everything was distasteful. I was no longer mistress of myself, and where my mind dwelt, thither I was fated to follow. What could stay me? Not toil and fatigue, nor yet the risk of the lynx‐eyed warders of this rocky hermitage of Caesar. Where the will is there is the way, and what were a thousand times the obstacles in the way of mine? I am near thee, Martialis—I have accomplished my purpose. I have come and I confess to thee the reason, and I a woman. To you the world would apportion the voice, and to me the silence; but I own no law, no guide, but you and the promptings of my own heart. I have broken the cold forms and rules which bind a woman’s unsought secret within her breast, even at the risk of her life. I make no excuse—I crave no pardon. Wherefore should I hide the truth? Could my lips alter it, or you blame it? You cannot chide me. Am I less a woman now than before? I have bared my heart to thee, Martialis, but it is still a woman’s, and it has never bent to any sway but yours.’ Could the young soldier’s senses have been more subtly stirred had he been a mariner of old, rousing himself in his idly‐floating boat to listen to the fatal, sweet ditties of a siren song stealing into his ears through the tranquil, yellow mist of evening?