The letter slipped from the boy’s fingers to the floor.  The wonderful voice of Virgil, which made men forget his slight frame and awkward manners, seemed to echo in his ears.  In that voice he had heard stately hexameters read until, shutting his eyes, he could have believed Apollo spoke from cloudy Olympus.  And this voice condescended now to plead with him and to offer him a new love.  Cynthia’s voice or his—­or his.  He tried to distinguish each in his clouded memory—­Virgil’s praising Rome, Cynthia’s praising himself.  His head ached violently, and his ears rang.  A blind rage seized him because he could not distinguish either voice clearly.  The letter was to blame.  He would destroy that, and one voice at least would cease its torment.  He gathered up the loose roll, twisted it in his trembling fingers, and held it to the flame of the little lamp.

“To Venus—­a hecatomb!” he shouted wildly.

As the parchment caught fire, the blaze of light illumined his flushed cheeks and burning eyes, and the boyish curve of his sullen lips.

* * * * *

It was in the spring, when the little marble Pan looked rosy in the warmer sunlight, and the white oxen must have been climbing the steeps of Assisi, that the boy’s mother let go her slight hold on life.  In Rome the roses were in bloom, and Soracte was veiled in a soft, blue haze.

Tullus came to Maecenas to excuse Propertius from a dinner, and a slave led him into the famous garden where the prime minister often received his guests.  Virgil was with him now, and they both cordially greeted the young official.  As he gave his message, his face, moulded into firm, strong lines by his habits of thought, was softened as if by a personal regret.  The three men stood in silence for a moment, and then Tullus turned impulsively to Maecenas.

“He chose between his mother and his mistress,” he said.  “When I talked with you in the winter you said that perhaps his mother would have to face death again to give birth to a poet, as she had already to give birth to a child.  I have never understood what you meant.”

“Ah, Tullus,” Maecenas answered, laying his hand affectionately upon the shoulder of the younger man, “I spoke of a law not inscribed on the Twelve Tables, but cut deep in the bedrock of life—­is it not, my Virgil?”

But the poet, toward whom he had quickly turned, did not hear him.  He stood withdrawn into his own thoughts.  A shaft of sun, piercing through the ilex trees, laid upon his white toga a sudden sheen of gold, and Maecenas heard him say softly to himself, in a voice whose harmonies he felt he had never wholly gauged before,—­

  Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

THE PHRASE-MAKER

  Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit.—­HORACE.