ild! She will forget!" she murmured.

But Varia spoke, in a voice straight from the land of dreams, opening
upon her eyes misty with sleep.

"One does not forget!" she said drowsily. "One loses a thing, for a long
time, it may be, but some shadow of that thing is always left, even to a
fool. Is it not so?"

"Ay, if thou sayest," said Nerissa, as readily as she would have agreed
that pigs were butterflies if her lady had willed them so. But Varia was
asleep before she spoke.

All through that night Nerissa held her nursling in fond, anxious arms
that knew no weariness, brooding over her as a mother with her child.

Just as gray dawn came drifting in at the windows, the feast in the
great house broke up, and the guests, most of them half drunken, sought
their rooms. And just at dawn word began to pass from station to
station, and from town to town, of a city set in flames--fair Anderida
in the South, as the crow flies, sixty Roman miles away. But of this,
and what it portended, the villa knew nothing.

IV

Many things happened that day which the villa and the world came to know
too well. The sun was scarcely an hour high when mounted men rode to the
villa, demanding to see its lord. Of these, one was Aurelius Menotus,
one of the two duumviri or governors of Anderida; and with him was his
son Felix, small and fair of skin, with weak eyes and a loose, stubborn
mouth, who wore no sword and whose arm was in a sling. Slaves brought
them to Eudemius, and he welcomed them, and they told their tale.
Aurelius was a shrunken man, with a baboon face, straggling gray hair,
and hands perfect as those of a god. He had ridden hard all night, and
was pasty pale with fatigue and trouble; and his staff, mostly old men,
were in hardly better plight. Two of the servants with them were
wounded; it was told that a third had died on the road. They were cared
for and given food and wine, and Eudemius sent for Marius to hear also
what they had to tell. No other guests were stirring.

"Two nights ago men came upon us," Aurelius said, in his thin and
nervous voice. "They come, men say, from Gaul, driven thence by Attila
the Hun, and seek safety among their kinsfolk who are already here. No
man can tell how the trouble first began. The first that we in the
palace knew, a soldier of the watch came and warned the guard that there
was fighting in the lower quarters of the city. For long no one could
tell what was the trouble; it was dark, an