Cornelius, makes their captors believe it is he. Cornelius is set free, deceived into thinking that Marius will follow shortly. The latter endures hardship and exhaustion as he journeys captive towards Rome, falls ill, and dying is abandoned by his captors. "Had there been one to listen just then," Pater comments, "there would have come, from the very depth of his desolation, an eloquent utterance at last, on the irony of men's fates, on the singular accidents of life and death."  Marius is tended in his last days by some poor country people, secret believers who take him to be one of their own. Though he has shown little interest in the doctrines of the new faith and dies more or less in ignorance of them, he is nevertheless, Pater implies, "a soul naturally Christian" (anima naturaliter christiana ) and he finds peace in his final hours as he reviews his life: "He would try to fix his mind on all the persons he had loved in life, dead or living, grateful for his love or not. In the