Ethne and Damaris were alone together in the familiar rooms of the quiet home among the streams of the wooded hills, when the tidings of the tragic end of Maximus reached them. When it was quite sure that the Vandals were on the sea, on their way to Rome, the citizens went mad with terror and despair, and seized on the wretched old enthroned official, as the nearest object on which to wreak their rage. He had perhaps been harsh as well as weak; to be just requires courage as well as good-nature. But whatever he had been, it was through him, as the cause of the appeal of the Empress, insulted by her unwilling nuptials, that the Vandals were coming. The nobles, and all who could take refuge in flight, fled. The panic was universal. The cause of it, a feeble doting old man, was at hand. The soldiers mutinied, the rabble rose, the slaves of the Imperial household, probably clinging to the young Empress of the ancient Imperial house, whose vices had only made the more revelry for them, and detesting the intruder, whose respectable virtues brought them no profit, abandoned the old man to the rioters. The smooth, orderly life ended in a ghastly tragedy. The Imperial household tore him limb from limb, dragged the fragments of the mangled body through the city, and then threw them into the Tiber, that no reparation of Christian rites of burial might be his. And the messenger who brought the terrible tidings to Damaris and Ethne added—“And the Vandals are here; their ships have been seen in the offing close to the port of Ostia.” [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XXVII. LEO AND THE VANDALS. For three days no news from Rome reached the villa on the Sabine hills. To Damaris and Ethne they were days of solitude spent in prayer for their beloved and for Rome. They prayed the “Our Father,” the great prayer of Christendom, over and over, engraving the unfathomable meanings of its simplicity deeper and deeper into their hearts. And “after that manner they prayed always,” every petition pervaded by the “Our Father.” And so the childlike asking for the daily bread and daily forgiveness became possible and real; the solitude of the prayer to “_My Father Who seeth in secret_,” ordained in the Divine ritual, expanded into Our Father’s all-embracing heaven, into the boundlessness of the One Family, into the _Our_ of the most solitary Christian prayer. Also, they prayed the collects of Leo, humble, grand, and simple, the “Grant us the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful;” the prayer to the Pilot of the Church and of each faithful soul, sure to be at the helm through every storm—“Grant that the course of this world may be so peacefully ordered by Thy governance, that Thy Church may serve Thee in all godly quietness.”