Glancing up at his face, she saw it lighted and shining with amusement--what seemed like tender, touched amusement. He was looking at something down the path. Marise looked with him and saw a workingman, one of the gardeners, digging in the earth of a rose-bed. Beside him capered and staggered a little puppy, a nondescript little brown cur with neither good looks nor distinction, but so enchanted with life, with itself, with the soft, good earth over which it pranced that to see it was, thought Marise, like playing Weber's "Perpetual Motion." As she looked it tried to run in a wavering circle around its master, tripped over its own feet, tumbled head over heels in a soft ball, clumsily struggled up and sat down to draw breath, a pink tongue hanging out of its wide, laughing mouth, its soft young eyes beaming with mirth at its own adventures. Its master glanced down and addressed some clucking, friendly greeting to it, which threw it into an agony of joy. Wagging its tail till its whole body wagged, it flung itself adoringly at its master's trousers, pawing and wriggling in ecstasy. Mr. Crittenden caught Marise's eye, and shared with her in a silent smile his delighted sense of the little animal's absurdity. "Perhaps if we looked down from this height and got a bird's-eye view we could settle that point," said Eugenia to Mr. Livingstone, who was still concerned about the location of the Temple of Mars. "There's a fine view from the wall at the end of this path." They strolled together to the wall, and Mr. Livingstone spread out on it his plan of the Forum. Marise looked down dispiritedly at the mutilated pillars and broken pieces of carved marble, and most of all at the bits of old Roman flagged paving. Nothing gave her a more acrid sense of futility than those old, old flag-stones over which so many thousands of human feet had eagerly, blindly sought their journey's end. Had any of them ever found what they sought? She murmured under her breath, "Isn't it all horribly, horribly depressing? Doesn't it make you feel all those endless centuries bowing your shoulders down to the earth--why not now as well as later?" She had stated it as she felt it, a truism, what every one must feel. Eugenia and Livingstone accepted it as such. "Yes, I often feel as ancient as the stones," said Eugenia pensively. Mr. Crittenden put in hastily, "Not on your life, it doesn't depress me! Why should it? You don't seem to realize, Miss Allen, what an immense difference there is between us! I never really took it in before myself--not until this visit to Rome. But it's immense! Enormous! Let me tell you about it. They're dead and we are alive! Alive!" Marise looked up at him, thinking that in truth she had never felt any one so alive. He bent his eyes to hers as Livingstone, with a little gesture of giving him up, drew Eugenia to the corner of the wall and traced lines on his map.