had been in his pasture for many an hour when Calpurnia came
to the farm. His mother was on her knees washing up the stone floor
of the kitchen. A sweet voice sounded in her ears, and she looked
up to see a goddess--as she thought in the first blinding moment--a
goddess dressed in silvery white with a gleam of gold at her throat.
Neither woman ever told all that passed between them in their long
talk in the sunlit courtyard, where they sought solitude, but when
Marcus's mother kissed her visitor's hands at parting, Calpurnia's
eyes shone with tears and her own were bright as with a vision.

When she went back into the kitchen, she found on the stone table
a great hamper, from which a bottle of wine generously protruded.
Her father-in-law from his chair in the window began an excited and
incoherent story. She ran to him and knelt by his side and begged
him to understand while she told him of a miracle. The dull old eyes
looked only troubled. So she choked back her tears and stroked his
hands gently and said over and over, until his face brightened, "You
are never going to be cold or hungry again--never cold or hungry."

Even with her many tasks the summer day seemed unending to her.
Finally, as the shadows lengthened, she could no longer endure to
wait and started out to meet Marcus. Across a green meadow she saw
him coming, walking soberly and wearily in front of his herded flock.
As he saw her, his listlessness fell from him and he ran forward
anxiously. But when he reached her and saw her eyes, his heart almost
stopped beating in glad amazement. And she held out her hands, while
the dog jumped up on them both in an ecstasy, and said to him, "My
son, Fors Fortuna, your Lady of the Spring, has blessed us. You are
to go to school."

Later in the evening, when the wonderful supper from the hamper had
been eaten and cleared away, and the grandfather had fallen
peacefully asleep, and the sheep and goats and hens had been tended
for the night, Marcus and his mother sat in the doorway beside the
red rosebush and dreamed dreams together of a time when house and
courtyard, renewed, should once more exercise a happy sovereignty
over fruitful acres. The world seemed Marcus's because he was to go
to school, this very year, in their own Como. They had not known
before that Pliny had offered to share with the citizens the expense
of a school of their own, so that boys need not go as far as Milan.
Marcus was awed into speechlessne