"Can you eat it?" she giggled unexpectedly.

"I owe you a sausage."

"And this is it? After two years, lord?"

"I had to go to Thrace," he told her gravely. "If I had missed the sea crossing it would have been the end of my career." He spoke as if he had seriously considered missing his ship anyway. Caenis felt an odd flutter. She ignored it stalwartly. He handed her the parcel. "I presume you are a girl who likes pickled fish?" She loved pickled fish. "Manage a stuffed egg?"

"Only one?"

"I ate the other on the way."

Genuinely shocked, she exclaimed before she could stop herself, "In the street, lord?"

"In the street," he returned placidly. For a moment she thought him a real country boy, innocent of his offense; then his gaze danced on her troubled face; he knew. Caenis frowned with a mixture of pleasure and puzzlement. She imagined him shambling through Rome's clamorous streets. Probably he would carry it off. Probably no one even noticed: a knight, a tribune newly released from military service and qualified for the highest administrative posts, all on his own, carrying a parcel, munching a stuffed egg.

"Deplorable," he agreed wickedly. "So—here's a man who pays his debts."

"Outside my experience!"

Her wry comment on the harshness of her moral world made him pause; then he continued, "I've been trying to find you for days. I'm such a permanent fixture the sausage-maker thinks I must be spying on him for his wife. I would have arrived earlier today, but the stuff was wrapped in some second-rate poet's cast-off manuscript. You know how it is—you glimpse one half-good phrase, then an hour goes by with you standing on the same street corner unraveling the paper trying to find the last appalling verse. . . . Well, can we share this?"

Caenis was beginning to feel frightened. Every word he uttered snatched at her sympathy. Alone with her for the first time, he made no effort to be gallant; nor did he fuss. Perhaps he supposed knights and senators were always dropping in with picnics. Those brown eyes knew exactly what he was doing to her. Suddenly he tried to beg for information: "There were some grand events in Rome after I went back to Thrace. Were you aware what lay in store for Sejanus?"