away over the tops of the awakening hills.  She had held her child close to her side as the carriage passed out under the gate of the town and began the descent into the plain, and the buoyant freshness of the morning had entered into her heart and given her hope for the boy’s future.  He was to grow strong and wise, his childish impetuosity was to be disciplined, he was to study and become a lawyer and serve his country as his ancestors had before him.  His father’s broken youth was to continue in him, and her life was to fructify in his and in his children’s, when the time came.

The mother bowed her head upon her clenched hands.  How empty, empty her hopes had been!  Even his boyhood had disappointed her, in spite of his cleverness at his books.  The irritability of his childhood had become moroseness, and he had alienated more often than he had attached his friends.  A certain passionate sincerity, however, had never been lacking in his worst moods; and toward her he had been a loyal, if often heedless, son.  In this loyalty, as the years passed, she had come to place her last hope that he would be deaf to the siren calls of the great city.  Outdoor sports and wholesome friendships he had rejected, even while his solitary nature and high-strung temperament made some defense against temptation imperative.

When he was eighteen he refused to go into law, and declared for a literary life.  She had tried hard to conceal her disappointment and timid chagrin.  She realised that the literary circle in Rome was quite different from any she knew.  It was no more aristocratic than her own, and yet she felt intuitively that its standards were even more fastidious and its judgments more scornful.  If Propertius were to grow rich and powerful, as the great Cicero had, and win the friendship of the old senatorial families, she could more easily adjust herself to formal intercourse with them than to meeting on equal terms such men as Tibullus and Ponticus and Bassus, and perhaps even Horace and Virgil.  But later her sensitive fear that she could not help her son in his new career had been swallowed up in the anguish of learning that he had entirely surrendered himself to a woman of the town.  This woman, she had been told, was much older than Propertius, beautiful and accomplished, and the lure of many rich and distinguished lovers.  Why should she seek out a slight, pale boy who had little to give her except a heart too honest for her to understand?

When the knowledge first came to her, she had begged for her son’s confidence, until, in one of his morose moods, he had flung away from her, leaving her to the weary alternations of hope and fear.  Two weeks ago, however, all uncertainty had ended.  The sword had fallen.  Propertius had published a series of poems boasting of his love, scorning all the ideals of courage and manhood in which she had tried to nurture him, exhibiting to Rome in unashamed nakedness the spectacle of his defeated youth.  Since the day when her slave had brought home the volume from the book-store and she had read it at night in the privacy of her bedroom, she had found no words in which to speak to him about his poetry.  Any hope that she had ever had of again appealing to him died before his cruel lines:—­