by carriage.

"I am going to walk," said Susanna in a low tone. "Would you like to
come with me?"

"With great pleasure."

They took leave of the others, went down the garden road, which was
decorated on both sides with ancient statues and tablets, and issued on
the Via di Santa Prisca, a street between two dark walls, with a lamp
every once in a while.

"What a sky!" she exclaimed.

"It is splendid."

It was of a blue with the lustre of mother-of-pearl; in the zenith a
stray star was imperceptibly shining; to the west floated golden and red
clouds.

They went down the steep street, alongside a garden wall. In some
places, bunches of century plants showed their hard spikes, sharp as
daggers, over the low walls.

There was a great silence in this coming of night. Among the foliage of
the trees they heard the piping of sparrows. From far away there came,
from time to time, the puffing of a train.

_DESOLATION_

They walked without speaking, mastered by the melancholy of their
surroundings. Now and again, a peasant, tanned by the sun, with his
little sack full of grass, came home from the fields, singing.

Caesar and Susanna passed alongside of the Jewish cemetery, and stopped
to look in through a grill. The wall hid the burning zone of twilight; a
greenish blue reigned in the zenith.

They went on again. A bell began to ring.

Caesar was depressed. Susanna was silent.

They crossed a street of new, dark houses; they passed by a little
square with a melancholy church. The street they took was named for
Saint Theodore. To the left, down the Via del Velabro, they saw an arch
with many niches on the sides of the single opening.

A band of black seminarians passed.

"Poor creatures!" murmured Caesar.

"Are you very sympathetic?" said Susanna, mockingly.

"Yes, those chaps rouse my pity."

Now, on the right, the furious ruins of the Palatine were piled up:
brick walls, ruined arches, decrepit partitions, and above, the terrace
of a garden with a balustrade. Over the terrace, against the sky, were
the silhouettes of high cypresses almost black, of ilexes with their
dense foliage, and a large palm with arching leaves.

From these so tragic ruins there seemed to exhale a great desolation,
beneath the deep, green sky.

Susanna and Caesar drew near the Forum.

In the opaque light of dusk the Forum had the air of a cemetery. Two
lighted windows were shining in the high dark wall of the Tabularium,
and