Gothic maid.

This evening Maximus seemed to suffer less. He lay with closed eyes,
a look of calm on his worn countenance. Beside him sat Decius,
reading in low tones from that treatise on the Consolation of
Philosophy, which Boethius wrote in prison, a hook wherein Maximus
sought comfort, this last year or two more often than in the
Evangel, or the Lives of Saints. Decius himself would have chosen a
philosopher of older time, but in the words of his own kinsman,
Maximus found an appeal more intimate, a closer sympathy, than in
ancient teaching. He loved especially the passages of verse; and
when the reader came to those lines--

'O felix hominum genus,
Si vestros animos amor
Quo coelum regitur, regat,'

he raised his hand, smiling with peculiar sweetness.

'Pause there, O Decius,' he said, in a weak but clear voice; 'let me
muse awhile.' And he murmured the verses to himself.





CHAPTER IV

TO CUMAE