Only with
the utmost difficulty, by clasping her arms around the animal, had she
prevented Bruna from attacking him.

"Your she-bear understands Latin," said Saturninus, who had sprung to
help her, smiling. "She knew what Herculanus said when he swore that
some day she should pay in the amphitheatre at Rome, under the teeth of
his Thessalian dogs, for the mischief she meant to do him here."

"Bruna in Rome?" the girl cried defiantly. "No more--than Bissula in
Burdigala!" But as she spoke she almost wept from rage, hate, and fear.

CHAPTER XLI.

Oppressed by sad yearning and anxiety, the usually light-hearted child
had again walked this evening from her tent to the lake gate, and
thence, driven back by the shouts of the Thracian sentries, wandered
through the whole camp to her beloved pine-tree, which had begun to
supply the place of the oak beside her forest home: for the tree of the
earth-goddess also afforded a convenient ascent like a stairway on its
broad branches drooping to the sacrificial stones, while on the central
trunk was a hiding-place invisible from below, with a comfortable back,
and the beloved view over the Roman fortifications to the mountain
peaks rising in the distance.

The sun had set long before, and darkness gathered quickly in that
region as soon as the glowing ball had vanished behind the wooded
western shores of the lake. There was no moon; only a few stars were in
the sky.

The wind bore to her ears from the distance scattered sounds: the
neighing of a horse, the rattle of a weapon, the shout of a sentinel at
the gate. Oh, those guards, who also watched her here in her spacious
prison, prevented her escape, her return to her people--for how much
longer? Sorrow overpowered her, and she felt that tears were about to
flow. But her tyrants should not see them; she would weep her fill, up
above there!

Bissula glided lightly up and sat so still in her hiding-place among
the boughs that a belated bird--a blackbird--perched for the night,
without seeing her, a few branches above her head.

Then the girl saw two men step cautiously from behind corner tents,
each at the end of a street running in opposite directions across the
camp; they made signs to each other, gazed carefully behind and
sideways, then hurried forward and met directly under the pine-tree on
its northern side, so that the huge trunk completely concealed them
from the camp.

Bissula bent