At the mouth of the river Boyne they drew the large flat-bottomed sea-galley up on the sands, and they made their way across the country to the house of the chieftain, the father of Ethne and Baithene. But for Dewi they would hardly have found it. The old chieftain and his wife could not endure the house on the cliff after it had been robbed of the treasures of their hearts by the pirates. For a time the very sight of the sea was terrible to the mother’s heart, like the sight of a blood-stained dagger that had been plunged into the hearts of her children; and they had gone to live on other lands belonging to the clan, near the river Blackwater. There Ethne and Baithene, with the babes, were welcomed home. That welcome brought a new revelation of what love and loyalty can mean to the hearts of Marius and Lucia. Every man and woman in the regions round rejoiced over them with great joy, as at the return of a son or daughter of their own; and also of something unutterably more important than any son or daughter of theirs could ever be, born chief and lady, yet flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone, the glory of their clan, the pride of their hearts, for whom every drop of their own hearts’ blood was due, and would have been freely given. Marius and Lucia, subjects of a corrupt court, whose Imperial families had often no past and therefore no future, to whom the throne was a mere front seat at a revel or a theatre, and the crown a mere decoration, felt here for the first time the overwhelming tide of the passion of loyalty. Citizens of a city which had no genuine common life of its own, which had flourished too long by draining out all the national and patriotic life in others, they learned for the first time what could be meant by the words Patria, Fatherland, Mother-tongue. Masters of a household of slaves, they had for the first time a glimpse of the honour there could be in loyal homage, to those who received and those who rendered it, of the faithfulness there could be in service based on kinship and affection. And simple as the dwelling was, with halls and chambers of clay and timber, to Marius and Lucia there was an inner grandeur in it higher than all the marble palaces of Ravenna or Rome. “Sister,” he said to Lucia, when they were alone, “your husband takes you out of a crumbling mass, of which you were simply the upper crust, and grafts you into a living tree, of which you and yours will be the fairest branch.” The chieftain and his wife stood at the door of the hall to welcome them. Their garments were homespun from the wool of their own flocks dyed in native dyes. But they stood there every inch royal in the grace of their reception of the strangers; and also in every pulse mother and father as they pressed the son and daughter to their hearts, and took the babes tenderly in their arms. Afterwards Lucia said to Ethne—