Osuin heard a terrible threat fall from his lips, and the same evening whispered it to Athalfrida.
'He will do well,' answered his wife, with brows knit.
On the morrow, Athalfrida and Veranilda sat together in the gardens, or what once had been the gardens, of Hadrian's palace, and looked forth over the vast brown landscape, with that gleam upon its limit, that something pale between earth and air, which was the Tyrrhene Sea.

Over the sky hung thin grey clouds, broken with strips of hazy blue, and softly suffused with warmth from the invisible sun.
'O that this weary war would end!' exclaimed the elder lady in the language of the Goths.

'I am sick of wandering, sick of this south, where winter is the same as summer, sick of the name of Rome.

I would I were back in Mediolanum.

There, when you look from the walls, you see the great white mountains, and a wind blows from them, cold, keen; a wind that sets you running and leaping, and makes you hungry.