Rusticiana made a
discovery which shortly led to the fulfilment of the Prefect's wish.

Rusticiana had a daughter of scarcely sixteen years of age, named
Camilla. She was a lovely girl, with a face of the true Roman type,
with nobly-formed features and chiselled lips. Intense feeling beamed
from her dark eyes; her figure, slender almost to delicacy, was elegant
and light as that of a gazelle, and all her movements were agile and
graceful. She had loved her unhappy father with all the energy of
filial devotion. The stroke that had laid his beloved head low had
entered deeply into her own young life; and inconsolable and sacred
grief, mixed with passionate admiration for his heroism, filled all her
youthful thoughts. A welcome guest at court before her father's death,
she had fled with her mother after the catastrophe over the Alps to
Gaul, where they had found an asylum with an old friend, while Anicius
and Severinus, Camilla's brothers, who had been also condemned, but who
were afterwards reprieved and sent into banishment, hastened at once to
the court at Byzantium, where they tried to move heaven and earth
against the barbarians.

When the first heat of persecution had abated, the two women had
returned to Italy, and led a retired life in the house of one of their
faithful freedmen at Perusia, whence, as we have seen, Rusticiana had
easily found means to join the conspiracy in Rome.

It was in June, that season of the year when the Roman
aristocracy--then as at this day--fled the sultry air of the towns, and
sought a refuge in their cool villas on the Sabine mountains, or at the
sea-coast. The two noble women, used to every luxury, felt extremely
ill at ease in the hot and narrow streets of Perusia, and thought with
regret of their beautiful villas in Florence and Neapolis, which,
together with all the rest of their fortune, had been confiscated by
the Gothic Government.

One day, their faithful servant, Corbulo, came to Rusticiana with a
strangely embarrassed expression of countenance, and explained to her
"how, having long since noticed how much the 'Patrona' suffered
under his unworthy roof, and had to endure much annoyance from his
handiwork--he being a mason--he had bought a small, a very small,
estate, with a still smaller house, in the mountains near Tifernum.
However, she must not compare it with the villa near Florentia; but
still there ran a little brook near it, which never dried up, even
under the do