She had seen all that was noblest in the city with Mario Provana for her guide, he for whom every street and every church was peopled with the spirits of the mighty dead, from the colossal dome that roofed the tomb of the warrior king who made modern Italy, to the vault where St. Peter and St. Paul had lain in darkness and in chains. She had seen and understood all these things with Mario at her side, enchanted by her keen interest in his beloved city, and delighted to point out and explain every detail. For Mario every out-of-the-way corner of Rome had its charm--for Claude Rome meant nothing but the afternoon drive along the Corso, and the bi-weekly meet of hounds on the Appian Way. Everything else was a bore. It was the Palatine where she and Mario had returned oftenest and lingered longest, for it seemed the sum of all that was grandest in the story of Rome, or, rather, it was Rome. How often she had stood by her husband's side on this noble terrace, gazing at the circle of hills, and recalling an age when this spot was the centre of the civilised earth! Here were the ruins of a forgotten world; and the palaces of Caligula and Nero seemed to belong to modern history, as compared with the rude remains of a city that had perished before the War-God's twins had hung at their fierce foster-mother's breast. Every foot of ground had its traditions of ineffable grandeur, and was peopled with ghosts. They stood upon the ashes of palaces more splendid and more costly than the mind of the multi-millionaire of to-day had ever conceived--the palaces of poets and statesmen, of Rome's greatest orators, and of her most successful generals; of Emperors whose brief reign made but half a page of history, ending in the inevitable murder; of beautiful women with whom poison was the natural resource in a difficulty; of gladiators elevated into demi-gods; of mothers who killed their sons, and sons who killed their mothers; and of all those hundred palaces, and that strange dream of glory and of crime there was nothing left but ruined walls, and the dust in which the fool's parsley and the wild parsnip grew rank and high. Amidst those memories of two thousand years ago, Vera felt as if life were so brief and petty a thing, such a mere moment in the infinity of time, that no individual story, no single existence, with its single grief, no wrong done, could be a thing to lament or to brood over. Nothing seemed to matter, when one remembered how all this greatness had come and gone like a ray of sunshine on a wall, the light and the glory of a moment. And what of those grander lives, the Christian martyrs, the men who fought with beasts, and gave their bodies to be burned, the women who went with tranquil brow and steadfast eyes to meet a death of horror, rather than deny the new truth that had come into their lives?