There follow passages of a diary of Marius with many vignettes of small sorrowful and loving things; a racehorse led to death, a crippled child at play with his sister, a boy, the son of a labourer, waiting with his father’s dinner, and gazing “with a sorrowful distaste for the din and dirt” at the brick-kiln where his father is at work. The _motif_ of the chapter is that an enlarged charity, a passionate sympathy with humanity, so apt to be excluded by a philosophical system, contains perhaps a truer estimate of the secret of life. “A protest comes, out of the very depths of man’s radically hopeless condition in the world.... Dared one hope that there is a heart, even as ours ... a heart even as mine, behind this vain show of things!” And now again Marius goes to the house of Cecilia, and sees the burial of a child; he notes that not even the intensity of human grief which the household feels and manifests in its stifled sobbing, its unrestrained tears, can do away with “the habitual gleam of joy, the placid satisfaction” of spirit. At the service is read aloud an epistle speaking of martyrdoms in Gaul, of Blandina and Ponticus, bringing to Marius the sense of the “strange new heroism,” uplifting sorrow out of the region of “private regret,” which seems to be appearing in the world. Marius sees the return of the Emperor in triumph; and he is filled with a sense of sickening reaction at the sight of the captives in the procession, and at the fact that one of so lofty a spirit as the Emperor can fall so low as to take his place in the midst of so barbarous a ceremony. “Aurelius himself seemed to have undergone the world’s coinage, and fallen to the level of his reward, in a mediocrity no longer golden.” And thus at that moment the vital failure of the philosophical attitude reveals itself to Marius; he sets out to revisit his old home, with a shadow of approaching disaster upon him. He opens the old mausoleum of the house, and the thought that he may be the last of his race, blending with a passionate tenderness for the past, his father, his ancestry, induces him to bury all the remains of the dead deep below the ground. “He himself watched the work, early and late; coming on the last day very early, and anticipating, by stealth, the last touches, while the workmen were absent; one young lad only, finally smoothing down the earthy bed, greatly surprised at the seriousness with which Marius flung in his flowers, one by one, to mingle with the dark mould.” And now the end comes with a certain unexpectedness. Marius, reflecting on his own life, sees that though with a natural bent for adventure and action, all his progress has been inward and meditative, always aiming at detachment rather than at the intermingling of himself with the current.