. The men were to follow him, without approaching,
to a certain point of his journey, then would close about him and his
attendants, who would be inferior in number, and carry them, with the
Gothic maiden, back to Rome. At the sight Marcian drew rein, and for a
moment sat in his saddle with bent head, suffering strangely. Sagaris
came up to his side, regarded him with anxious eye, and asked whether
the heat of the sun's rays incommoded him; whereupon he made a negative
sign and rode on.

He tried to laugh. Had he forgotten the subtlety of his plot for
deceiving Pelagius? To have made known to the deacon where Veranilda
really was, would have been a grave fault in strategy. These armed
horsemen imagined that a two days' journey lay before them, whereas the
place of Veranildas imprisonment would be reached this evening. The
artifice he had elaborated was, to be sure, full of hazard; accident
might disconcert everything; the instruments upon whom he reckoned
might fail him. But not because of this possibility was his heart so
miserably perturbed. It was himself that he dreaded--the failure of his
own purpose, the treachery of his own will.

On he rode in the full eye of the August sun. The vast, undulant plain
spread around him; its farms, villas, aqueducts no less eloquent of
death than the tombs by the wayside its still air and the cloudless
azure above speaking to a man's soul as with the voice of eternity.
Marcian was very sensible of such solemn influence. More than once, in
traversing this region, he had been moved to bow his head in devotion
purer than that which commonly inspired his prayers, but to-day he knew
not a moment's calm. All within him was turbid, subject to evil
thoughts.

A little before noon he made his first halt. Amid the ruins of a
spacious villa two or three peasant families had their miserable home,
with a vineyard, a patch of tilled soil, and a flock of goats for their
sustenance. Here the travellers, sheltered from the fierce sun, ate of
the provisions they carried, and lay resting for a couple of hours.
Marcian did not speak with the peasants, but he heard the voice of a
woman loud in lamentation, and Sagaris told him that it was for the
death of a child, who, straying yesterday at nightfall, had been killed
by a wolf. Many hours had the mother wept and wailed, only interrupting
her grief to vilify and curse the saint to whose protection her little
one was confided.

When he resumed his j