s still safe, still unassailed. They were passing
where the road was bordered by its houses of the dead; tombs of the
great families, above which the funereal cypresses bent their heads and
shed peace and shade alike over the dead and the living. The hum of
the city came to their ears, and, as the convoy drew nearer to the
Capenian Gate, the throng, pouring out to meet them, grew thicker and
more dense, blocking the way until the cavalry of the escort cleared it
with their spear-butts. Then the press divided, running along on both
sides of the carriages, in two fast-filling streams whose murmurs
swelled into a very torrent's roar of questions and prayers for news of
the general and the army.

"Was Hannibal beaten? Had he been slain, or was he waiting in chains
to grace the Fabian triumph? Was it true that he measured twice the
height of common men, and that a single eye blazed cyclops-like in the
middle of his forehead? How many elephants would be seen in the
triumph?"

Such and a hundred queries, equally wild, assailed the escort and the
occupants of the wagons; for this was the rabble: poor citizens,
freedmen, slaves, for whom no story of Hannibal and Carthage was too
improbable. Nevertheless Sergius imagined he could discern a spirit of
irony underlying much that he heard.

When they had reached the low eminence that, crowned by the Temple of
Mars, faced the city gate, he bade the attendants help him descend from
the army carriage, that he might wait the coming of his slaves with a
litter. A messenger was soon found, and hurried off, charged with
necessary directions.

The crowd had rolled on through the gate, together with the convoy, and
the sick man was left alone save for the attendants of the temple in
whose care he had placed himself. Day by day, as he had jolted along
his journey, he had felt the fever coming on--fever born of his injury
and the terrible strain to which he had been subjected: now it was only
necessary to reach his home and rest. Last of his race but for two
older sisters who had married several years since, the spacious mansion
of the family of Fidenas was his alone, with its slaves and its
ancestral masks and its cool courts and its outlook over the seething
Forum up to the opposite heights of the Capitol. There he would find
care and comfort for the body if not for the soul.

And now the patter of running feet sounded from the pavement below.
They were come, at last, with th