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your brother, and the sun stands in the sign of Capricorn, you will wish that you had stayed upon the Wall.”
    I shivered, not understanding what lay beneath the words I knew so well—I who had been present at his pain and his re-birth, as he had been at mine.
    “Shall I see you again, Julian?”
    “Do you want to?”
    I was silent.
    He said, “That is a question I should not have asked. Yes, I think we shall meet again.”
    He raised his hand in a salute of farewell and I acknowledged it before turning away.
    My men were sitting huddled round a fire when I came to them and Quintus, wrapped in his white cloak, was walking his horse up and down.
    “Well,” he said. “What did he want?”
    “I was just saying goodbye to an old friend.”

IV
    A ELIA COUGHED AND said, huskily, “Shall we ever leave Borcovicum, do you think?”
    Quintus rattled the dice again and smiled bitterly. “The Wall is a place only for forgotten and disgraced men. But at least the frontier is quiet and we may live in peace.”
    I said nothing. My unfulfilled dreams hurt no longer; the seasons passed, one like another; and I was content that it should be so.
    Then an imperial courier rode up from the south with the news that Theodosius had died at last. I paraded my men, as in the old style, and with the snow falling upon our battered armour and our dulled swords I told them that the child, Honorius, was now emperor and bade them take the oath of allegiance. They did so, four or five hundred shabby men in worn cloaks, whose hands, toughened only by farming now, had not held a sword in years; while the bored sentries on the guard-walk turned their backs upon the white dumbness of the heather and leaned upon their shields to watch a ceremony that once—performed by the legions—might have made or broken an emperor.
    We had other news later. A horse trader on his way to Petriana told me that a Vandal general in the service of the empire had been named guardian to Honorius, and that this general—Stilicho—was looked upon as the one man who might yet be the saving of Rome. He had driven the Franks and the Alemanni back into Germania and had secured the Rhenus frontier once more.
    That winter it was bitterly cold and we had difficulty over fuel. By the shortest day the stock of black stones that we kept in the old guard-room by the blocked-up eastern gate had run low, and it was hard to chip out a fresh supply from the ice-bound outcrop we had worked for years. Aelia developed a bad cough that grew worse instead of better. Even when packed in blankets by the meagre fire in our quarters she did not cease shivering, and the sight of her face, with its sunken eyes, made us all afraid. I would have sent her south but the roads were impassable and in any case, as Saturninus said afterwards, she would not have left us. Quintus was a good friend at that time. He would ride over and sit beside her on those occasions when my duties took me from the fort; and he did much to cheer her up. I kept on saying to myself that when the spring comes she will be well again. Each night and each morning I prayed to Mithras, and I prayed to her god as well. He at least should have heard me. Her god cared for the weak and the sick, she used to say, but he did not help her now, and when the spring came at last, she died.
    That summer I went down to Eburacum and asked for a transfer. Constantinus was chief of staff now; an ambitious middle-aged man who had shared a hut with me in my legionary days with the Twentieth. He had a son, Constans, in command of an ala. Him, I did not like. He was contemptuous, cruel and conceited, and had too much of a following among the younger officers.
    I spent my time either waiting in the empty ante-rooms of the repaired headquarters of the Sixth, or walking through the neglected streets. Sometimes I would sit in the empty amphitheatre and try not to think of my wife. . . . He had come out of that gate there, leading the rear of the