The first to pass away from them was Fabricius. The dishonour and humiliation of Rome had lowered the already ebbing tide of life. His gaze had always been one of wistful yearning towards the past; but towards the close he learned to see that the past lives on in the heavenly future. After his death the palace on the Aventine became simply a group of homes for the suffering and the destitute. And so by a natural Divine classification, not of like with like, but with unlike, Damaris gathered around her all kinds of suffering and need, the various needs supplying and helping each other: the aged watching the tottering steps of the young; the little ones gladdening the sick and aged; each learning to feel that they had some gift to spare as well as some need to be supplied. And thus with Damaris old age was not a fading, but a ripening into the fuller life. One day she said to Ethne, when some fresh sign of weakness had grieved the daughter’s heart, as with a foresight of the close— “Thou who lovest to dwell among thy fountains surely wilt not grudge me to the land of the fountains of living waters! For what are thy fountains after all, thy ‘fountain of heavenly blue’ and thy Aqua Claudia, but aqueducts, though indeed aqueducts chiselled by Divine hands? Whence do they come, the ever-flowing, exhaustless springs of thy hills?” And Ethne said, with the far-off look in her eyes— “Truly the clouds, mother, are ever feeding the springs, and the clouds drink of the seas; the smallest spring which is perennial must indeed have its source in the infinite and the eternal.” Damaris took her hands and laid them on her own heart. “Higher than our highest hills,” she said, “we must go for our fountains.” “But,” said Ethne, “does not the Christ, did not our Leo, speak of a well of living water springing up _within_ us, here and now?” “Surely He does,” Damaris replied. “And if He leads me by His fountains above, I shall know that He, the Source of all the fountains, is with thee here. I am leaving thee in no parched desert land. How else could there be ‘no hunger nor thirst’ for _me_, there?” “But the City of God,” Ethne resumed, with tearful pleading, “is building also on earth; thou wilt not leave us too soon for the one above? Hast thou not said that our Rome is a city not only of the _fountains_, but of the _steps_? Stay with us! stay with us yet a little while, and help our feebler feet to climb.” And Damaris _did_ stay yet a little while. But at last the last step for her was reached, the step over the invisible threshold—and she entered into light; but she did not leave them in darkness, for as she entered, the light shone through on them. “Death,” she had been wont to say, “does not close the door of the unseen for us. Death is always keeping it open, both for those he takes and for those he leaves behind.” And when she died they found it true.