s arms; that not the salt
waves of trackless seas but the easy passage of a city street marked
his distance from a soldier's grave? He had blamed death for his
separation from Valerius. But what Death had been powerless to
accomplish his own choice of evil had brought about. Between him and
his brother there now walked the Estranger--Life.

A POET'S TOLL

I

The boy's mother let the book fall, and, walking restlessly to the
doorway, flung aside the curtains that separated the library from
the larger and open hall. The December afternoon was sharp and cold,
and she had courted an hour's forgetfulness within a secluded room,
bidding her maid bring a brazier and draw the curtains close, and
deliberately selecting from her son's books a volume of Lucretius.
But her oblivion had been penetrated by an unexpected line, shot like
a poisoned arrow from the sober text:--

Breast of his mother should pierce with a wound sempiternal,
unhealing.

That was her own breast, she said to herself, and there was no hope
of escape from the fever of its wound. A curious physical fear took
possession of her, parching her throat and robbing her of breath.
It was a recoil from the conviction that she must continue to suffer
because her son, so young even for his twenty-three years, had openly
flouted her for one of the harpies of the city and delivered over
his manhood to the gossip-mongers of Rome.

Seeking now the sting of the winter air which she had been avoiding,
she pushed the heavy draperies aside and hurried into the atrium.
Through an opening in the roof a breath from December blew
refreshingly, seeming almost to ruffle the hair of the little marble
Pan who played his pipes by the rim of the basin sunk in the centre
of the hall to catch the rain-water from above. She had taken pains
years ago to bring the quaint, goat-footed figure to Rome from Assisi,
because the laughing face, set there within a bright-coloured garden,
had seemed to her a happy omen on the day when she came as a bride
to her husband's house, and in the sullen hours of her later sorrow
had comforted her more than the words of her friends.

As she saw it now, exiled and restrained within a city house, a new
longing came upon her for her Umbrian home. Even the imperious winds
which sometimes in the winter swept up the wide valley, and leaped
over the walls of Assisi and shrieked in the streets, were better
than the Roman Aquilo which during these last