“Do all the great wrongs die in that way,” asked Ethne, “by some one dying under them?” “The Cross is on our Christian banners!” said Damaris. “Of what wrongs were you thinking?” “I was thinking of Troyes,” Ethne replied, “of the young deacon falling under the spears of the Huns, of the aged Bishop Lupus giving himself up to Attila, and of the city being saved. And,” she added, softly, “I was thinking also of the great wrong of slavery, and of Patrick, who brought the freedom of Christ to our country, having been himself once a slave.” Damaris looked at the girl very tenderly, but as if a new light had suddenly dawned on her. Slavery was so essential a part of that old civilization, Greek and Roman, that even to her it had scarcely occurred that it was anything but an inevitable natural evil, like earthquakes and storms; but she said nothing. A very close sympathy bound these two to each other; they seemed so often to read each other’s thoughts, and in doing so to find their own grow clearer. Many were the galleries of the past through which Damaris led Ethne. The great poems of the ancient world were unlocked at her touch, one palace chamber after another; especially the great poems of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, the poems of the Battle and the Wandering. Ethne would say they explained so much, since the battles and the wanderings seem always there. And Lucia would answer— “Does not that make you sad?” And Ethne would say— “Why should it? We have the _key_, now! We know that the wanderings are pilgrimages to the home, and the battles may always be victories.” “But we cannot always see the victory,” Lucia said. And Ethne—“How could it be a battle still if we did?” Then there was the story of Prometheus, the bound Titan, with its mighty entangled reverberations of the great revolt and the great redemption. So Ethne’s world of thought grew into order to the music of the great voices. Of the feeble, imitative echoes of the present happily she heard little. Also in that memorable winter Ethne accomplished the great elementary step of learning to read. And the gentle strains of Virgil went deep into her heart, as afterwards into the hearts of so many of the saints of her own race. Fortunately for her there was only one literary language then to learn, and it was something to learn Latin as a household speech from those to whom it was the natural language of their infancy. But dearest of all to Ethne was the translation of “the Testaments of God” into the vulgar tongue by Jerome, the Jerome who had written letters to the kindred of Damaris, and had prayed and preached in the oratory on the Aventine, where they worshipped every day. One day Lucia entering Ethne’s chamber found her kneeling by a table entirely absorbed in a manuscript. “What new treasure have you found?” Lucia asked.