‘He will do well,’ answered his wife, with brows knit.

On the morrow, Athalfrida and Veranilda sat together in the gardens, or what once had been the gardens, of Hadrian’s palace, and looked forth over the vast brown landscape, with that gleam upon its limit, that something pale between earth and air, which was the Tyrrhene Sea.  Over the sky hung thin grey clouds, broken with strips of hazy blue, and softly suffused with warmth from the invisible sun.

‘O that this weary war would end!’ exclaimed the elder lady in the language of the Goths.  ’I am sick of wandering, sick of this south, where winter is the same as summer, sick of the name of Rome.  I would I were back in Mediolanum.  There, when you look from the walls, you see the great white mountains, and a wind blows from them, cold, keen; a wind that sets you running and leaping, and makes you hungry.  Here I have no gust for food, and indeed there is none worth eating.’

As she spoke, she raised her hand to the branch of an arbutus just above her head, plucked one of the strawberry-like fruits, bit into it with her white teeth, and threw the half away contemptuously.

‘You!’ She turned to her companion abruptly.  ’Where would you like to live when the war is over?’

Veranilda’s eyes rested upon something in the far distance, but less far than the shining horizon.

‘Surely not there!’ pursued the other, watching her.  ’I was but once in Rome, and I had not been there a week when I fell sick of fever.  King Theodoric knew better than to make his dwelling at Rome, and Totila will never live there.  The houses are so big and so close together they scarce leave air to breathe; so old, too, they look as if they would tumble upon your head.  I have small liking for Ravenna, where there is hardly dry land to walk upon, and you can’t sleep for the frogs.  Verona is better.  But, best of all, Mediolanum.  There, if he will listen to me, my brother shall have his palace and his court—­as they say some of the emperors did, I know not how long ago.’

Still gazing at the far distance, Veranilda murmured: 

‘I never saw the city nearer than this.’

‘I would no one might ever look upon it again!’ cried Athalfrida, her blue eyes dark with anger and her cheeks hot.  ’I would that the pestilence, which haunts its streets, might make it desolate, and that the muddy river, which ever and again turns it into a swamp, would hide its highest palace under an eternal flood.’

Veranilda averted her face and kept silence.  Thereupon the other seemed to repent of having spoken so vehemently.

‘Well, that’s how I feel sometimes,’ she said, in a voice suddenly gentle.  ‘But I forgot—­or I wouldn’t have said it.’

‘I well understand, dear lady,’ replied her companion.  ’Rome has never been loyal to the Goths.  And yet some Romans have.’

’How many?  To be sure, you know one, and in your thought he stands for a multitude.  Come, you must not be angry with me, child.  Nay, vexed, then.  Nay then, hurt and sad.  I am not myself to-day.  I dreamt last night of the snowy mountains, and this warmth oppresses me.  In truth, I often fear I shall fall sick.  Feel my hand, how hot it is.  Where are the children?  Let us walk.’