“Ah, lady! ah, my child!” said Miriam, passionately, “pray thou for the husband of my youth, if thou canst indeed pray to One Who sees and hears; pray for him, that the glamour and enchantment may pass away. The clutch of Mammon is around him closer and closer, crushing out his heart, his life, entwined so fearfully with what is dearest and best, his love for our child. He seems only to care for one thing besides—these sacred relics of our ancient glory. He also steals in here from time to time, and I have seen the tears on his wrinkled old face, making it look for the moment young again, as if the old days and the old life might come back yet.” The family stayed all that winter on the Aventine, and more and more Ethne’s heart was drawn to Fabricius and Damaris, with a deep and tender reverence for the old age which seemed creeping on them too soon, as if the dissolution and decay of the falling world around them were gathering them into its shadow. For this corrupt city, this Rome, over which Augustine had mourned, after the siege of Alaric, forty years before, as the fallen Babylon, had fallen deeper than ever, had indeed become “a habitation of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean bird, with her merchandise of bodies and souls of men.” Again and again “her sins had reached unto heaven,” and God had remembered her iniquities; but she, as her faithful Leo had told her again and again, remembered not her sins, nor her chastenings, nor her deliverances, but still said in her heart, “I sit a Queen, and shall see no sorrow.” Even as they had entered the streets on their return from Ireland, full of the din of wild revelry, Ethne’s nurse had said—“Is this the city which has been plundered and burnt so often, which we heard was saved so lately from destruction by the prayers of the great Bishop?” And Ethne could only say, “God did save the city once more through Leo—once more!” knowing what depths of misery and iniquity lay seething underneath all this foam and noise.