'It disturbs him if we move about!' said the little spinster in a smiling whisper, her finger on her lip. And suddenly the girl was conscious of a lightning flash from lifted eyes--a look threatening and peremptory. She settled herself into her chair again as quietly as possible, and sat with head bent, a smile she could not repress playing round her lips. It was all she could do indeed not to laugh, so startling and passionate had been the monition conveyed in Mr. Manisty's signal. That the great man should take little notice of his aunt's guest was natural enough. But to be frowned upon the first evening, as though she were a troublesome child!--she did not resent it at all, but it tickled her sense of humour. She thought happily of her next letter to Uncle Ben; how she would describe these rather strange people. And at first she hardly listened to what was being read. The voice displeased her. It was too emphatic--she disliked its tremolo, its deep bass vibrations. Surely one should read more simply! Then the first impression passed away altogether. She looked up--her eyes fastened themselves on the reader--her lips parted--the smile changed. * * * * * What the full over-rich voice was calling up before her was a little morning scene, as Virgil might have described it, passing in the hut of a Latian peasant farmer, under Tiberius. It opened with the waking at dawn of the herdsman Cæculus and his little son, in their round thatched cottage on the ridge of Aricia, beneath the Alban Mount. It showed the countryman stepping out of his bed into the darkness, groping for the embers on the hearth, re-lighting his lamp, and calling first to his boy asleep on his bed of leaves, then to their African servant, the negro slave-girl with her wide mouth, her tight woolly hair. One by one the rustic facts emerged, so old, so ever new:--Cæculus grinding his corn, and singing at his work--the baking of the flat wheaten cakes on the hot embers--the gathering of herbs from the garden--the kneading them with a little cheese and oil to make a relish for the day--the harnessing of the white steers under the thonged yoke--the man going forth to his ploughing, under the mounting dawn, clad in his goatskin tunic and his leathern hat,--the boy loosening the goats from their pen beside the hut, and sleepily driving them past the furrows where his father was at work, to the misty woods beyond. With every touch, the earlier world revived, grew plainer in the sun, till the listener found herself walking with Manisty through paths that cut the Alban Hills in the days of Rome's first imperial glory, listening to his tale of the little goatherd, and of Nemi. * * * * * 'So the boy--Quintus--left the ploughed lands, and climbed a hill above the sleeping town. And when he reached the summit, he paused and turned him to the west.