“I thought all Christians knew Patrick’s hymn,” she said, with some surprise, and she began to chant softly some of her beloved Irish lorica and “breastplate.” “But I do not know your language,” he said. Ethne translated—“‘Christ at my right hand, at my left; Christ in the fort, in the battle, on the sea; by the way, at the end.’ Is it not sure to be so with all Christians? Is it not sure to be so with the holy Bishop Lupus?” He hesitated a moment, and then said— “Christ our Lord suffers some very hard things to happen to His Christians.” “I know. We were told so,” she answered. “He said so. But the hymn says He is with us on all the ways, however rough; and certainly always at the end, however dark.” He was silent. Her faith and hope were stealing like sunshine into his heart, but, like the sunshine, silently. “I am going with my soldiers,” he said, after a pause, “to keep them from oppressing the poor peasants. The Huns have robbed them of nearly everything, and an army of hungry men following the Huns must not be suffered to take the little that is left.” “I know,” she said, with a flash of quick sympathy; “the Huns are not the only robbers. The people seem to suffer everywhere, from every one. Baithene has heard them say the misery was there long before the Huns came. There are the tax-gatherers and the slave-masters everywhere.” “Everywhere,” Marius replied, “and always.” “And you will help the oppressed and save them from the oppressors?” she said, her whole face lighting up, the royal heart going forth to the poor and the down-trodden. “I will try,” he said; “I am going back to Rome.” “They are taking us there also,” she said; and she parted from him with a smile which was to him as an illumination from heaven. He wrote to his sister—“The wound was worse than I knew. But I have had tender care and nursing in the house of a Jew called Eleazar, from his wife Miriam, and from two young Christian captives, and I am quite strong again. And, beloved, I think I have found the Fountain of Youth at last; and I hope may bring some drops to thee also. Tell my mother of these two young Christian captives, son and daughter of a king or chieftain from the farthest West, the Scottish-land, Hibernia, the island Rome never conquered. They were kidnapped by British pirates, and bought by Eleazar, an aged Jew, who with his wife Miriam lives at Rome, and is taking them thither. They must be ransomed. Farewell.” [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XII. ST. PATRICK’S CHILDREN IN ST. LEO’S CITY. Great was the exultation in Rome at the news of the victory on the Catalaunian plains, the defeat of Attila, and his retreat with his Huns to their camps beyond the Danube. The echo of the triumph soon reached the quiet portico of the palace on the Aventine, where Damaris and Lucia were sitting together in the hush of a July noon. Fabricius came in with the news.