The officer who was at the head of the band of slaves seemed struck by the four travellers, so contrasted in types of face and figure, and yet so evidently belonging to each other. Especially he fixed his eyes on the fair face of Ethne, the athletic form of Baithene, and the dog of the much-prized Irish breed. After he had passed them he turned back, and asked Eleazar where he lived, and if the dog was to be purchased, and said he might look in some day and inquire about it.
Something in the officer’s look and bearing made Ethne look down and draw closer to Miriam, and Baithene look up defiantly and throw his arm around the dog, whilst the dog pricked up his ears, and gave a suspicious low growl.
When they reached Eleazar’s lodging at the top of a tall house on the further side of the Tiber, where many of his countrymen congregated, and had separated into their different rooms for the night, Ethne said to her brother—
“Have you the tablet the Roman soldier at Troyes gave us for his mother and father, who live in a palace on one of these hills?”
“Surely,” he said; “why do you ask?”
“I can scarcely say why,” she answered, with a shiver. “But this great Rome seems to me lonelier than the sea, and stranger than our first step into a strange land, and more like a den of lions than besieged Orleans or the camp of the Huns. The people look at us so strangely, as if we were foreign animals, or pieces of merchandise for sale.”
“And we are!” moaned Baithene.
“Let us say the paternoster and Patrick’s hymn,” she rejoined, “and try and go to sleep.” But they slept little.
Nor did Miriam and Eleazar sleep much better.
“Dost thou know that man with the sinister face,” she said, “who spoke to thee about the dog to-day?”