He felt his hand imprisoned tightly within the warm grasp of her soft, white palms. Her breath played upon his cheek, and the gloom of their leafy shelter could not hide the shadowy, star‐like lustre of her eyes close upturned to his. His ears drank in the rich, thrilling tones of her voice, quivering, like her glorious form, with excess of passion. The delicate perfumes of her attire welled around him, and invaded his faculties like the very essences of her overpowering loveliness. The touch, the eloquent motions, the soft abandon of this creature of superb womanhood: the strange, bewitching phenomenon of her haughty imperiousness sinking into the overwhelming flood of passionate love and tender submission beglamoured his mind. His senses seemed overcharged. As one might seek relief from a choking sensation, he reared his head backwards, with a deep, noiseless breath, and swept his eyes athwart his shoulder round the sea and star‐lit heavens. Extraordinary and dream‐like as his whole experience of that night was, it was no illusion, such as he began to think it might be. There was the horned moon, bright and tranquil in the dark sky; and there was the track of its silvery radiance dancing on the softly‐rippling waters below. The night‐air, too, palpably rustled the leaves around his head, and a soft, velvety touch at that moment quivered through him. It was the delicate pressure of her ripe, warm lips on his hand. It awoke the Pretorian to himself and brushed away the brief mist of sensuous sweetness which had enthralled him. To have remained wholly indifferent to such a passionate revelation of the loveliest lips—to have rested unmoved by the soft contact and surrender of the richest wealth of female beauty Rome could show, would have been to renounce all in common with human nature, even on the part of one bred with the phlegmatic coldness and self‐possession of a northern clime. But Plautia had cast herself before one born to the same native characteristics of ardent and impulsive blood as herself, though not perhaps in an equal degree of intensity. With his pulses yet tingling he recalled, by a flash of thought, all the evident signs of pleasure and satisfaction with which she had hitherto greeted his presence when chance had thrown them together for a brief period. Her relaxed haughtiness, her glances and smiles were now, it seemed, only too well fraught with real meaning. Her excuses and pretexts for companionship, and a hundred little arts, which had never caused him more thought than an amused gratification, down to the latest evidence of all, in the gift she had sent to the camp, were now supplemented and concluded with a startling explanation. In common with the rest of Rome he had admired her magnificent beauty of face and form, and, by a most natural process of a man in love, he had as often criticised her by the standard of the maiden enthroned in his heart of hearts.