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“Yes! yes! the boat is stopping! Now they’re going into the fortress!” exclaimed Betty excitedly, as with breathless interest she watched the soldiers being marched along the river bank by their officers.

“Can we go across the bridge?” she asked a moment later.

“Of course we can. No one sees us. No one hears us. We are invisible—for as long as we choose to be. Come, we’ll cross over to the fortress.”

Dancing with excitement, Betty followed her on to the bridge, over which, all the time she and Godmother had been standing on the bank, people had been crossing and recrossing. They were the strangest-looking folk imaginable, but so far she had been too confused and too interested in the soldiers to do more than glance at them.

“Let us stand here a moment, and watch,” Godmother suggested, drawing her back against the wooden parapet of the bridge.

“That’s a Roman nobleman,” she observed, as a fine-looking man passed, wearing a tunic, a white cloak wrapped round part of his body, the end flung over one shoulder, and sandals made of twisted leather. “That’s his villa over there.” She pointed to a house at some little distance set in the midst of blossoming fruit-trees.