"As had certain others, too," smiled the girl, looking down.

"You are beautiful," I commented, regarding her face, and lineaments, in the light of the nearby fire.

"Thank you, Master," she whispered.

"Was this new girl proud?" I asked.

"I think only of such things as her capacity for love, and her bondage," she said.

"But you said she was free," I reminded her.

"Of her natural bondage," she smiled."

"She was not then, in a normal sense, proud?"

"Not in ways typical of a vain free woman, at any rate."

"But yet," I said, "this new girl, unlike the rest of you, was wearing a slave strip."

"Ah, Master," said the girl, "it is as I suspected. It is you who redeemed us."

"Of course," I said.

"The new girl would not speak the identity of her captor, but, I take it, it was you who brought her to the coffle of Ephialtes."

I nodded. I had, of course, warned Phoebe to silence, with respect to whose captive she was, as my business in the north, at least at that time, had been secret.

"Her docility on the chain, its beauty on her, her eagerness to obey, and such, suggested that it might have been you, or someone like you," she said.

I shrugged.

"And I thought it might have been you," she said, "from little things she would say, or knowing looks, or responses to our questions, or shy droppings of her gaze. In such ways can a woman speak, even when she is pretending not to. I think she was shyly eager to tell us all about you."

I nodded again. I was not unfamiliar with the small talk, the tiny riddles, the hints, the delights of conversing slaves. I had little doubt that Phoebe, and without too much provocation, might have revealed more of me, and of our relationship, and past, and such, than I would have approved of. She was marvelously feminine. It would not really do, of course, to whip her for such things, as she was free, and, even in the case of slaves, masters tend to be tolerant of such things. They make the girl so much more human.