ople 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.

After his burial I began my search for the woman whose face I had seen
in the crowd. My mother never asked me whence I came or where I went.
The death of Phoebus had destroyed the trembling joy with which she
had seen me return to her: happiness came to her too late. When grief
has sat long by one hearth, it is impossible to warm the ashes of joy
again: they are cold and dead for ever. My time passed sadly; a
terrible calmness had succeeded to the gayety and noise of my life; a
frightful silence had replaced the frenzied shouts, the boisterous
laughter, of the people: sometimes it seemed to me that I had died, not
Phoebus.

The constant hope of finding the woman I had seen but once occupied me
always. I roamed the country without ceasing, always