He tried to laugh.  Had he forgotten the subtlety of his plot for deceiving Pelagius?  To have made known to the deacon where Veranilda really was, would have been a grave fault in strategy.  These armed horsemen imagined that a two days’ journey lay before them, whereas the place of Veranildas imprisonment would be reached this evening.  The artifice he had elaborated was, to be sure, full of hazard; accident might disconcert everything; the instruments upon whom he reckoned might fail him.  But not because of this possibility was his heart so miserably perturbed.  It was himself that he dreaded—­the failure of his own purpose, the treachery of his own will.

On he rode in the full eye of the August sun.  The vast, undulant plain spread around him; its farms, villas, aqueducts no less eloquent of death than the tombs by the wayside its still air and the cloudless azure above speaking to a man’s soul as with the voice of eternity.  Marcian was very sensible of such solemn influence.  More than once, in traversing this region, he had been moved to bow his head in devotion purer than that which commonly inspired his prayers, but to-day he knew not a moment’s calm.  All within him was turbid, subject to evil thoughts.

A little before noon he made his first halt.  Amid the ruins of a spacious villa two or three peasant families had their miserable home, with a vineyard, a patch of tilled soil, and a flock of goats for their sustenance.  Here the travellers, sheltered from the fierce sun, ate of the provisions they carried, and lay resting for a couple of hours.  Marcian did not speak with the peasants, but he heard the voice of a woman loud in lamentation, and Sagaris told him that it was for the death of a child, who, straying yesterday at nightfall, had been killed by a wolf.  Many hours had the mother wept and wailed, only interrupting her grief to vilify and curse the saint to whose protection her little one was confided.

When he resumed his journey, Marcian kept glancing back until he again caught sight of the company of horsemen; they continued to follow him at the same distance.  On he rode, the Alban hills at his right hand, and before him, on its mountain side, the town for which he made.  The sun was yet far from setting when he reached Praeneste.  Its great walls and citadel towering on the height above told of ancient strength, and many a noble building, within the city and without, monuments of glory and luxury, resisted doom.  Sulla’s Temple of Fortune still looked down upon its columned terraces, but behind the portico was a Christian church, and where once abode the priests of the heathen sanctuary, the Bishop of Praeneste had now his dwelling.  Thither did Marcian straightway betake himself.  The bishop, a friend and ally of Leander, received him with cordiality, and eagerly read the letter he brought.  Asked whether Vigilius had left Rome, Marcian was able to tell something of the Pope’s departure, having heard the story just before his own setting forth; whereat the prelate, a man of jovial aspect, laughed unrestrainedly.