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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
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