She was sitting at home alone, as she had been alone these ten years and more. When she saw the dead baby in those glistening spangled clothes she shuddered, and understood without words. "Another life?" she said, and said nothing more: she was thinking of my father. Then she took the dead child and laid him on her knees as if he had been a living one, and rocked him on her breast and smoothed the sand out of his pretty yellow curls. "The people go always in the hope of seeing something die," she said at length. "That is what they go for: you killed the baby for their sport. It was cruel." I went out of the house and felt as if I had murdered him--the little fair, innocent thing who had run along with us over the dusty roads, and along the sad seashores, and under the forest trees, laughing and chirping as the birds chirp, and when he was tired lifting up his arms to be carried on the top of the big drum, and sitting there throned like a king. Poor little dead Phoebus! It was true what my mother had said: the people throng to us in hope of seeing our death, and yet when they do see it they are frightened and sickened and sorrowful. Orte was so this night. "Could I help it?" I cried to my comrades fiercely; and in my own soul I said to myself, "Could I help it? That woman looked at me." Who was she? All through the pain that filled me for the death of the child that wonder was awake in me always. She had looked so strange there, so unlike the rest, though she was all in black and had the lace about her head which is common enough in our country. All the night long I saw her face--a beautiful face, with heavy lids and drooping hair, like that marble head they call the Braschi Antinous down in Rome. Little Phoebus was laid that night in my mother's house, with lilies about him, while a little candle that the moths flickered into burnt at his feet. As I sat and watched by him to drive away the rats which came up in hordes at night from Tiber into the rooms that overhung the river, I only saw that face. It had been a bad home-coming. I would play no more in Orte, nor go with these men any more. I disbanded my troop and let them pass their own ways. I had coin enough to live on for months: that was enough for the present. I felt as if the sight of the red rope and the spangled vest and the watching crowd would be horrible to me--those things which I had loved so well. Little Phoebus was put away in the dark earth, as the little Etruscan children had been so many hundred years before him, and I buried his little crown and his little coat with him, as the Etruscans buried the playthings. Poor little man! we had taught him to make Death his toy, and his toy had been stronger than he.