Cestus sought the little upstairs chamber, where he slept, and, having hidden the letter to Fabricius in a safe place till required, he cast himself on his pallet, wearied in body and intensely irritated in mind. Here he fell asleep and found the day far gone when he awoke. His precious missive occupied his first thoughts, and he went down into the town to try and discover some chance of sending the same—a public post system being unknown. In this he was lucky. A trading vessel had touched on her voyage to the Tiber, and he found the master thereof perfectly willing to do as he required. Cestus went and brought the letter and delivered it into the seaman’s hands, with full instructions and a liberal subsidy. A visit to a wine‐shop, where the liquor flowed plentifully, completed the transaction, and then Cestus took leave of his new friend with many parting injunctions. A couple of days passed, during which Cestus never left the immediate vicinity of the house for any great length of time. He felt constrained to the exercise of vigilance, but the restraint upon his accustomed habits of liberty and self‐indulgence soon began to prove very irksome. Nor did anything happen during that time to hinge the least interest upon. ‘If I had chanced to leave the place for two or three hours, something would have been sure to have turned up,’ he grumbled. But what little had occurred had permanently unsettled the equilibrium of his mind. He was beset with a certain kind of vague uneasiness, dull, intangible, but sleepless; of the disagreeable nature of an ill presentiment, which set the profoundest intellectual subtlety at defiance. His restlessness increased, and the current of his thoughts set, with increasing constancy and eagerness, toward his native Rome, till the longing resembled that of a sick man or exile. The feeling rose so strongly, that the early removal of himself to the great city took its place as the first and most absorbing care of his mind. The family of the potter, of course, he, of necessity, included with himself. On the third day after the departure of Martialis, he was sitting alone over the fire in the house, with his elbow on his knee and his hairy chin on his hand, deeply occupied in arranging his method of procedure, or rather in deciding on the manner of approaching Masthlion on the subject, since the potter’s assent was the only real difficulty to be met. His meditations were interrupted by the touch of a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and saw Neæra standing beside him. He made as if to rise, with the deference he had acquired in her presence, but, without removing her hand from his bulky shoulder, she pressed him gently down in his place. ‘You were very deep in your thoughts, uncle; you never heard me come.’ ‘That’s true enough,’ he replied, with a smile; ‘but your footstep lacks weight to rouse a sleeper or day‐dreamer.’