r only, none the less."

Just there the conversation broke off suddenly, and the disputants
parted. The horses were come for Lucian. The boy went on his way, and
Marius onward, to visit a friend whose abode lay further. As he
returned to Rome towards evening the melancholy aspect, natural to a
city of the dead, had triumphed over the superficial gaudiness of the
early day. He could almost have fancied Canidia there, picking her way
among the rickety lamps, to rifle some neglected or ruined tomb; for
these tombs were not all equally well cared for (Post mortem nescio!)
and it had been one of the pieties of Aurelius to frame a severe law to
prevent the defacing of such monuments. To Marius there seemed to be
some new meaning in that terror of isolation, of being left alone in
these places, of which the sepulchral inscriptions were so full. A
blood-red sunset was dying angrily, and its wild glare upon the shadowy
objects around helped to combine [171] the associations of this famous
way, its deeply graven marks of immemorial travel, together with the
earnest questions of the morning as to the true way of that other sort
of travelling, around an image, almost ghastly in the traces of its
great sorrows--bearing along for ever, on bleeding feet, the instrument
of its punishment--which was all Marius could recall distinctly of a
certain Christian legend he had heard. The legend told of an encounter
at this very spot, of two wayfarers on the Appian Way, as also upon
some very dimly discerned mental journey, altogether different from
himself and his late companions--an encounter between Love, literally
fainting by the road, and Love "travelling in the greatness of his
strength," Love itself, suddenly appearing to sustain that other. A
strange contrast to anything actually presented in that morning's
conversation, it seemed nevertheless to echo its very words--"Do they
never come down again," he heard once more the well-modulated voice:
"Do they never come down again from the heights, to help those whom
they left here below?"--"And we too desire, not a fair one, but the
fairest of all. Unless we find him, we shall think we have failed."

CHAPTER XXV: SUNT LACRIMAE RERUM+

[172] It was become a habit with Marius--one of his
modernisms--developed by his assistance at the Emperor's "conversations
with himself," to keep a register of the movements of his own private
thoughts and humours; not continuously indeed, yet som