"No, Witichis, too good."
"Well, people must learn to bear with and appreciate each other."
"I could not do that. They could perhaps learn to bear with me, out of fear of thee. But I should daily tell them to their faces that they are hollow, false, and bad!"
"So, then, thou wilt rather do without thy husband for months?"
"Yes, rather do without him, than be near him in a false and unfitting position. Oh, my Witichis!" she added, encircling his neck with her arm, "consider who I am and how thou foundest me! where the last settlements of our people dot the edge of the Alps, high up upon the steep precipices of the Scaranzia; where the youthful Isara breaks foaming out of the ravines into the open plains, there stands my father's lonely farm; there I knew of nought but the hard work of summer upon the quiet alms, of winter in the smoke-blackened hall, spinning with the maids. My mother died early, and my brothers were killed by the Italians. So I grew up lonely, no one near me but my old father, who was as true, but also as hard and close, as his native rocks. There I saw nothing of the world which lay outside our mountains. Only sometimes, from a height, I watched with curiosity a pack-horse going along the road deep below in the valley, laden with salt or wine. I sat through many a shining summer evening upon the jagged peaks of the high Arn, and looked at the sun sinking splendidly over the far-away river Licus; and I wondered what it had seen the whole long summer day, since it had risen over the broad Œnus; and I thought how I should like to know what things looked like at the other side of the Karwändel, or away behind the Brennus, over which my brothers had gone and had never returned. And yet I felt how beautiful it was up there in the green solitude, where I heard the golden eagle screaming in its near eyrie, and where I plucked more lovely flowers than ever grow in the plains, and even, sometimes, heard by night the mountain-wolf howling outside the stable-door, and frightened it away with a torch. In early autumn, too, and in the long winter, I had time to sit and muse; when the white mist-veils spun themselves over the lofty pines; when the mountain wind tore the blocks of stone from our straw-roof, and the avalanches thundered from the precipices. So I grew up, strange to the world beyond the next forest, only at home in the quiet world of my thoughts, and in the narrow life of the peasant. Then thou earnest--I remember it as if it had happened yesterday----"
She ceased, lost in recollection.
"I remember it too, exactly," said Witichis. "I was leading a centumvirate from Juvavia to the Augusta-town on the Licus. I had lost my way and my people. For a long time I had wandered about in the sultry summer day, without finding a path, when I saw smoke rising above a fir-tree grove, and soon I found a hidden farm, and entered the yard-gate. There stood a splendid girl at the pump, lifting a bucket----"
"Look, even here in the valley, in this southern valley of the Alps, it is often too close for me; and I long for a breath of air from the pine-woods of my mountains. But at court, in the narrow gilded chambers! there I should languish and pine away. Leave me here; I shall manage Calpurnius well enough. And thou, I know well, wilt still think of home, wife, and child, when absent in the royal halls."
"Yes, God knows, with longing thoughts! Well then, remain here, and God keep thee, my good wife!"
The second day after this conversation Witichis again rode away up the wooded heights.