to the house.
There, in the old man's chamber, they talked in low voices for a long
time.

At supper, Adalgoth was missing.

He sent word to Gotho by their grandfather that he had gone to bed,
being more tired than hungry.

But at night, when Gotho slept, he went into her room on tiptoe. The
moon threw a soft light upon her angel face.

Adalgoth stopped upon the threshold, and only stretched out his right
hand towards her.

"I shall see thee again, my Gotho," he cried, and signed a farewell.

Presently he crossed the threshold of the simple alpine cottage.

The stars had scarcely begun to pale; fresh and exhilarating the
night-wind blew from the mountains around his temples.

He looked up at the silent sky.

All at once a falling star shot in a bright semicircle over his head.
It fell towards the south.

The youth raised his shepherd's staff, and cried:

"The stars beckon thither! Now beware, Cethegus the traitor!"

CHAPTER V.

On seeing the disastrous result of the battle at the bridge across the
Padus, the Prefect had sent messengers back to his troops and the armed
citizens of Ravenna, who were following him, to order them to return at
once to the latter city. He left the defeated troops of Demetrius to
their fate.

Totila had taken all the flags and field-badges of the twelve thousand,
a thing which, as Procopius angrily writes, "never before happened to
the Romans."

Cethegus himself, with his small band of trusty adherents, hastened
across the AEmilia to the west coast of Italy, which he reached at
Populonium. There he went on board a swift ship of war, and, favoured
by a strong breeze from the north-east (sent, as he said, by the
ancient gods of Latium), sailed to the harbour of Rome--Portus.

He could never have succeeded in reaching Rome by land, for, after
Totila's victory, all Tuscany and Valeria fell to the Goths; the plains
unconditionally, and also such cities as were held by weak Byzantine
garrisons.

Near Mucella, a day's march from Florence, the King once again
vanquished a powerful army of Byzantines, under the command of eleven
disunited leaders, who had gathered together the imperial garrisons of
the Tuscan fortresses to block his way. The commander-in-chief of this
army, Justinus, escaped to Florence with difficulty.

The King treated his numerous prisoners with such lenity, that very
many Italians and imperial mercenaries deserted their