Vedia shrieked and clung to me, clutching
me so I had to remonstrate with her in order to be able to slide shut and
fasten the open front panel. I had barely fastened it when another roar as
loud, sudden, and long answered the first from the other side of us,
somewhere in the swamp tract. This time Vedia did not shriek, she only
clung closer to me. I held her as close as she held me and, so clinging to
each other, in the pale glimmer of the moonlight striking on the shell
panes in the panels, we listened to repetitions of the roars, each time
nearer, till the two beasts were roaring at each other not much more than
its length from the carriage, apparently facing each other across the dead
pole-horses. I expected a fight, but they ceased roaring, and, by the
sounds they made, fell to gorging themselves on horse-meat.
When we had become used to their proximity, since, after a lapse of time
which seemed like half an hour or more, they kept on crunching and rending
without any roarings and without coming nearer the carriage, Vedia, her
arms still about me, told me the story of her doings since my downfall.
Most of it was taken up with social gaieties and with rejections of
tolerated suitors.
Then she, shyly, told me of her liking for Orensius Pacullus, of Aquileia,
and her promise to marry him.
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