A blood-red sunset was dying angrily, and its wild glare upon the shadowy objects around helped to combine [171] the associations of this famous way, its deeply graven marks of immemorial travel, together with the earnest questions of the morning as to the true way of that other sort of travelling, around an image, almost ghastly in the traces of its great sorrows--bearing along for ever, on bleeding feet, the instrument of its punishment--which was all Marius could recall distinctly of a certain Christian legend he had heard.

The legend told of an encounter at this very spot, of two wayfarers on the Appian Way, as also upon some very dimly discerned mental journey, altogether different from himself and his late companions--an encounter between Love, literally fainting by the road, and Love "travelling in the greatness of his strength," Love itself, suddenly appearing to sustain that other.

A strange contrast to anything actually presented in that morning's conversation, it seemed nevertheless to echo its very words--"Do they never come down again," he heard once more the well-modulated voice: "Do they never come down again from the heights, to help those whom they left here below ?"--"And we too desire, not a fair one, but the fairest of all.

Unless we find him, we shall think we have failed.".