‘Caesar has ordered these apartments for your use; and these slaves will be under your orders,’ said he, bowing her in with a deep obeisance. Plautia gave a haughty nod and passed in with her own attendant. Zeno gently closed the door upon them, and his deprecating look gave place to a satisfied grin, as he hurried away to a different portion of the palace, in order to report to his master. Plautia found that the room formed one of a suite. After the unwonted experience of a husbandman’s kennel, the space and luxurious arrangements of these apartments could not fail to draw from her a sigh of satisfaction, in spite of her position. The state of her mind was indeed unenviable. After the horror and misery of the night in her wretched quarters, the brief moments of slumber, which fell, finally, on her exhausted senses, had not sufficed to relieve her fevered mind. They had seemed, instead, to have only sunk her faculties into the first leaden state of suspension,—to have lulled the wakefulness of her tortured brain, and plunged it into the horrors of a narcotic sleep, amid whose heavy vapours, her struggling reflections became the distorted phantasms of an oppressive dream. Even yet her mind had not recovered sufficient elasticity to entirely throw off this soporific load. Stupor still seemed to clog her senses and maintain her in a condition of waking sleep. The scenes of the past night still floated through her brain and mingled with what was actually occurring, as if on common ground of unsubstantiality. The pale, soft crescent of the moon hung phantom‐like in her distempered mind, just as it had struck upon her gaze over the Pretorian’s shoulder; save that now its bulk swam magnified, and its paleness shone intensified to ghastliness. Then the play of his warm breath on her forehead, and one or two of his gestures, which lived, as if fire‐impressed in her brain—all the sharper, in relief to the dark, blurred, frenzied moments of sudden agony and despair which had followed, like a gulf of blackness. After this her mental awakening in the pitchy darkness and crash of the sudden storm, the misery of the night, the phantoms of her short drowsiness, the coming of Caesar’s messenger, the cold gray of sea and sky, the palace—it was all like the unbroken course of a shadow‐play. She moved through the rooms, and, in the furthest, found the marble basin of a bath with all appliances. With more animation, she turned instantly, and bade the flock of young slaves prepare it for her immediate use. To have been obliged to forego, for a considerable period, this luxury so necessary to a Roman, had been not the lightest privation she had incurred in her headstrong expedition.