and soon around them gathered a number of unattached highwaymen, who sought protection and profit in allying themselves with the band led by the redoubtable lanista.  But if Dumnorix was the right arm of this noble company, Publius Gabinius was its head.  The Roman had sorely missed the loss of the thousand and one luxuries that made his former life worth living.  But, as has been said, he had become sated with almost every current amusement and vice; and when the freshness of the physical hardships of his new career was over, he discovered that he had just begun to taste joys of which he would not soon grow weary.

And so for a while the bandits ranged over the mountains, infested the roads, stopped travellers to ease them of their purses, or even dashed down on outlying country houses, which they plundered, and left burning as beacons of their handiwork.  Even this occupation after a time, however, grew monotonous to Gabinius.  To be sure, a goodly pile of money was accumulating in the hut where he and Dumnorix, his fellow-leader, made their headquarters; and the bandits carried away with them to their stronghold a number of slave and peasant girls, who aided to make the camp the scene of enough riot and orgy to satisfy the most graceless; but Gabinius had higher ambitions than these.  He could not spend the gold on dinner parties, or bronze statuettes; and the maidens picked up in the country made a poor contrast to his city sweethearts.  Gabinius was planning a great piece of finesse.  He had not forgotten Fabia; least of all had he forgotten how he had had her as it were in his very arms, and let her vanish from him as though she had been a “shade” of thin air.  If he must be a bandit, he would be an original one.  A Vestal taken captive by robbers!  A Vestal imprisoned in the hold of banditti, forced to become the consort, lawful or unlawful, of the brigands’ chief!  The very thought grew and grew in Gabinius’s imagination, until he could think of little else.  Dumnorix and his comrades trusted him almost implicitly; he had been successful as their schemer and leader in several dark enterprises, that proved his craft if not his valour.  He would not fail in this.

An overmastering influence was drawing him to Rome.  He took one or two fellow-spirits in his company, and ventured over hill and valley to the suburbs of the city on a reconnoissance, while by night he ventured inside the walls.

The capital he found in the ferment that preceded the expulsion of the tribunes, on the fateful seventh of January.  Along with many another evil-doer, he and his followers filched more than one wallet during the commotions and tumults.  He dared not show himself very openly.  His crime had been too notorious to be passed over, even if committed against a doomed Caesarian like Drusus; besides, he was utterly without any political influence that would stand him in good stead.  But around the Atrium Vestae he lurked in the dark, spying out the land and waiting for a