was which, despite his conquest of the greater part of Italy, made
Totila thus slow and cautious in his approach to Rome. He remembered
that Vitiges, who laid siege to the city with a hundred thousand men,
had retreated at last with his troops diminished by more than half, so
worn and dispirited that they scarce struck another blow against
Belisarius. The Greek commander, Totila well knew, would not sally
forth and risk an engagement: to storm the battlements would be an
idle, if not a fatal, attempt; and how, with so small an army, could he
encompass so vast a wall? To guard the entrance to the river with his
ships, and to isolate Rome from every inland district of Italy, seemed
to the Gothic king the only sure way of preparing his final triumph.
But time pressed; however beset with difficulties, Belisarius would not
linger for ever beyond Hadria. The resistance of Tibur excited Totila's
impatience, and at length stirred his wrath. Osuin heard a terrible
threat fall from his lips, and the same evening whispered it to
Athalfrida.

'He will do well,' answered his wife, with brows knit.

On the morrow, Athalfrida and Veranilda sat together in the gardens, or
what once had been the gardens, of Hadrian's palace, and looked forth
over the vast brown landscape, with that gleam upon its limit, that
something pale between earth and air, which was the Tyrrhene Sea. Over
the sky hung thin grey clouds, broken with strips of hazy blue, and
softly suffused with warmth from the invisible sun.

'O that this weary war would end!' exclaimed the elder lady in the
language of the Goths. 'I am sick of wandering, sick of this south,
where winter is the same as summer, sick of the name of Rome. I would I
were back in Mediolanum. There, when you look from the walls, you see
the great white mountains, and a wind blows from them, cold, keen; a
wind that sets you running and leaping, and makes you hungry. Here I
have no gust for food, and indeed there is none worth eating.'

As she spoke, she raised her hand to the branch of an arbutus just
above her head, plucked one of the strawberry-like fruits, bit into it
with her white teeth, and threw the half away contemptuously.

'You!' She turned to her companion abruptly. 'Where would you like to
live when the war is over?'

Veranilda's eyes rested upon something in the far distance, but less
far than the shining horizon.

'Surely not _there_!' pursued the other, watching her. 'I was but once