hanged hardly a dozen
words. When,' added Aurelia, smiling, 'were you so dashed in a maid's
presence?'

'Nay, never! I am not accused of too much modesty; but when I entered
and looked on Veranilda--oh, it was the strangest moment of my life!
Noble cousin,' he added pleadingly, 'honoured Aurelia, do but tell me
what is her parentage?'

'How does that concern your Excellence? I have told you all that it
imports you to know--at all events for the present. Cousin Basil, you
delay the letter; I should wish her to have it before nightfall, for
she thinks anxiously of me.'

'I go. When may I again speak with you?'

'You shall hear when I am at leisure.'

Basil despatched his servant to Cumae not with one letter only, but
with two. Greatly daring, he had himself written to Veranilda; in brief
terms, but every word tremulous with his passion. And for half an hour
he stood watching the sail which wafted his messenger over the gulf,
ruffled to-day by a south-west wind, driver of clouds. Little thought
had he to give to the dying Maximus, but at the ninth hour he turned
his steps to the oratory, once a temple of Isis, and heard the office,
and breathed a prayer for his kindly relative. Which duty discharged,
he prayed more fervently, to whatever saint or deity has ear for such
petitions, that he might be loved by the Gothic maid.

This evening Maximus seemed to suffer less. He lay with closed eyes, a
look of calm on his worn countenance. Beside him sat Decius, reading in
low tones from that treatise on the Consolation of Philosophy, which
Boethius wrote in prison, a hook wherein Maximus sought comfort, this
last year or two more often than in the Evangel, or the Lives of
Saints. Decius himself would have chosen a philosopher of older time,
but in the words of his own kinsman, Maximus found an appeal more
intimate, a closer sympathy, than in ancient teaching. He loved
especially the passages of verse; and when the reader came to those
lines--

'O felix hominum genus,
Si vestros animos amor
Quo coelum regitur, regat,'

he raised his hand, smiling with peculiar sweetness.

'Pause there, O Decius,' he said, in a weak but clear voice; 'let me
muse awhile.' And he murmured the verses to himself.

CHAPTER IV

TO CUMAE

The Bishop of Surrentum, an elderly man and infirm, had for the past
fortnight been unable to leave his house, but day by day he received
news of what passed at the villa of Maximus, and hel