“I know,” replied Lucia; “and that is another reason for its being preferable to going to dine with our cousin Petronius Maximus. He is _not_ a heathen; and, moreover, Marius said the Emperor Valentinian would probably be there.” The mother shuddered visibly. “That is no reason for any good maiden or matron being there,” she said. “God forbid that we should risk our pearl amidst the wickedness of the court of Ravenna.” “They would not be wicked to us,” replied the girl, with a scornful curl of the beautiful lips. “We are of the Anician house, no new family like these Byzantines!” “We have seen too many of the ancient Roman names on the roll of the slaves,” replied Damaris. “It is scarcely forty years since from the ruins of this palace, where our noble kinswoman Marcella lived, and where the holy women of the Ecclesia Domestica came and listened to Jerome, she was borne, bruised and beggared, to die in one of the basilicas, during the siege and sack of Alaric the Goth.” “But, mother, all that is ancient history now. Alaric has been lying forty years in the bed of the river they turned aside to make his tomb. And this old Rome of ours, which he sacked and tried to ruin, lives on.” “Lives?—yes!” was the mournful answer. “Rome is still living, still dying.” “But, mother,” resumed the maiden, after a pause, “the world is always dying, the sermons say; yet the children are always being born into it, and we are the children now, and have to live.” “There is another city,” said the mother, tenderly stroking the dark tresses as they fell unbound on her arm, “the City of God, always dying from earth, but ever living.” “You are thinking of Saint Augustine’s great book,” said Lucia; “you have heard Augustine’s own voice?” “Once at Hippo, once at Ostia, where his mother, the blessed Monica, died in such joy. Augustine died, you know, at Hippo, ten years since, amongst his flock, during the siege of the Vandals.” “Augustine could not save his Hippo from the Vandals,” said Lucia; “then _he_ could scarcely have died with great joy, when he had so many of his flock to leave in misery.” “He died in faith,” said Damaris gravely, “finding comfort in taking his place among the lowest, repeating the penitential psalms.” “They must be very terrible, those Vandals,” resumed Lucia. “I am glad it was the Goths and not the Vandals that sacked our Rome; they would have left little behind. And, moreover, the Vandals are Arians, which makes them know how to distinguish and persecute the Catholic Christians better than the heathen can. Mother, is the Emperor Valentinian, who is so far from being good, a Catholic?” “He supports the Catholics. He listens to our Bishop Leo, like his Aunt Pulcheria, Empress of the East.” “It seems almost a pity a wicked emperor should be a Catholic,” said Lucia meditatively. “It seems so much easier to understand when the people who do wrong think wrong too.” There was a pause, then the mother said—