days had been biting
into the very corners of the house. And how often, under the winter
sun, the northern valley used to lie quiet and serene, its brown
vineyards and expectant olive orchards held close within the shelter
of the blue hills which stretched protectingly below the
snow-covered peaks of the Apennines. How charming, too, the spring
used to be, when the vineyards grew green, and the slow, white oxen
brought the produce of the plain up the steep slopes to the town.

She wondered now why, in leaving Assisi when Propertius was a child,
she had not foreseen her own regretful loneliness. Her reason for
leaving had been the necessity of educating her son, but the choice
had been made easy by the bitterness in her own life. Her husband
had died when the child was eight years old, and a year later her
brother, who had bulwarked her against despair, had been killed in
the terrible siege of Perugia.

Her own family and her husband's had never been friendly to Caesar's
successor. Her husband's large estates had been confiscated when
Octavius came back from Philippi, and her brother had eagerly joined
Antony's brother in seizing the old Etruscan stronghold across the
valley from Assisi and holding it against the national troops. The
fierce assaults, the prolonged and cruel famine, the final
destruction of a prosperous city by a fire which alone saved it from
the looting of Octavius's soldiers, made a profound impression upon
all Umbria. Her own home seemed to be physically darkened by evil
memories. Her mind strayed morbidly in the shadows, forever
picturing her brother's last hours in some fresh guise of horror.
She recovered her self-control only through the shock of discovering
that her trouble was eating into her boy's life also.

He was a sensitive, shrinking child, easily irritated, and given to
brooding. One night she awoke from a fitful sleep to find him
shivering by her bed, his little pale face and terrified eyes defined
by the moonlight that streamed in from the opposite window. "It is
my uncle," he whispered; "he came into my room all red with blood;
he wants a grave; he is tired of wandering over the hills." As she
caught the child in her arms her mind found a new mooring in the
determination to seek freedom for him and for herself from the
memories of Assisi, where night brought restless spectres and day
revealed the blackened walls and ruins of Perugia.

That was fourteen years ago, but to-day she kn