contented in the country-side and his slaves were better treated than many Roman citizens.  He had given his old nurse a little farm to live on and sent one of his freedmen to Egypt when he was threatened with consumption.  But she had never found the courage—­she could not find it now—­to believe that he would care what happened to a child in no way connected with him.  His wealth, by no means the largest known in his own circle, to her seemed appalling.  The Emperor could not have been more distant from her than this magnate, who, although he had been born in Como and was said to love his Como villas better than any of his other houses, yet had about him the awful remoteness of Rome.  Of course she could never be admitted to his presence.  She could only store up a few more coins each year and trust to the gods.

With a start she realised that to-day was the festival of Fors Fortuna.  In the hurried morning she had forgotten to remind Marcus of his prayers.  In the days when the farm had been sure of the largest harvest in the neighbourhood this summer festival had been brilliantly celebrated, and as long as Marcus’s father had lived the family had still cherished the quaint rites and the merrymaking of a holiday especially dear to the common people of both city and country.  But in these later years there had been neither time nor money for any fetes.  Piety, however, was still left, and it was characteristic of the scrupulousness persisting in Marcus’s mother through all the demoralising experiences of poverty that, after she had finished the heavier tasks, she should set to work to mark the religious day by a freshly washed cloth upon the table, with a bowl of red roses picked from the bush that grew by the doorway, and a gala supper of new-laid eggs, lentil soup and goat’s milk cheese.

In the meantime Marcus had been having adventures.  His pasture was on a grassy plateau of a mountain slope, edged by heavy green cypresses and dotted with holm-oaks.  In the woods above him chestnut and walnut trees showed vividly against the silver olives.  Below stretched the shining waters of the Larian Lake.  Here, while the sheep browsed happily, he was wont to feed his little soul on dreams.  Sitting to-day where he could look out to a distant horizon, his blue tunic seeming to insert into the varied greens about him a bit of colour from sky or lake, he dug his toes into the soft grass and for the hundredth time tried to think out how he could attain his heart’s desire.  He knew exactly what that was.  He wanted to go to school!  If anyone had tried to find out why, he would have discovered in the boy’s mind a tangled mass of hopes—­hopes of helping his mother and owning once more their big fields and vineyards, of going to Rome and coming home again, rich and famous.  But to any glorious future school was the portal, of that he was sure.  The nearest boys’ school was in Milan, and to Milan he must go.  The golden fleece on the borders of strange