Scorning to punish a woman whom he regarded as insane for an absence from the tents of the Goths which was of no moment wither to the army or to himself, Alaric had impatiently dismissed her from his presence when she was brought before him.

The soldiers who had returned to bury the body of their chieftain in the garden of the farm-house, found means to inform her secretly of the charitable act which they had performed at their own peril, but beyond this no further intercourse was held with her by any of her former associates.
All her actions favoured their hasty belief that her faculties were disordered, and others shunned her as she shunned them.

Her daily allowance of food was left for her to seek at a certain place in the camp, as it might have been left for an animal too savage to be cherished by the hand of man.

At certain periods she returned secretly from her wanderings to take it.

Her shelter for the night was not the shelter of her people before the walls of Rome; her thoughts were not their thoughts.