us struck his hand against his
forehead, and cried eagerly, "Directly--I will bring you a fresh draught.
In a few minutes I will be back again."

Sirona looked after him as he hastened away. Her gaze became more and
more staring and glazed, and she felt as if the rock, on which she was
sitting, were changing into the ship which had brought her from Massilia
to Ostia. Every heaving motion of the vessel, which had made her so giddy
as it danced over the shifting waves, she now distinctly felt again, and
at last it seemed as if a whirlpool had seized the ship, and was whirling
it round faster and faster in a circle. She closed her eyes, felt vaguely
and in vain in the air for some holdfast, her head fell powerless on one
side, and before her cheek sank upon her shoulder she uttered one feeble
cry of distress, for she felt as if all her limbs were dropping from her
body, as leaves in autumn fall from the boughs, and she fell back
unconscious on the stony couch which Paulus had constructed for her.

It was the first swoon that Sirona, with her sound physical and mental
powers, had ever experienced; but the strongest of her sex would have
been overcome by the excitement, the efforts, the privations, and the
sufferings which had that day befallen the unfortunate fair one.

At first she had fled without any plan out into the night and up the
mountain; the moon lighted her on her way, and for fully an hour she
continued her upward road without any rest. Then she heard the voices of
travellers who were coming towards her, and she left the beaten road and
tried to get away from them, for she feared that her greyhound, which she
still carried' on her arm, would betray her by barking, or if they heard
it whining, and saw it limp. At last she had sunk down on a stone, and
had reflected on all the events of the last few hours, and on what she
had to do next. She could look back dreamily on the past, and build
castles in the air in a blue-skyed future-this was easy enough; but she
did not find it easy to reflect with due deliberation, and to think in
earnest. Only one thing was perfectly clear to her: she would rather
starve and die of thirst, and shame, and misery-nay, she would rather be
the instrument of her own death, than return to her husband. She knew
that she must in the first instance expect ill-usage, scorn, and
imprisonment in a dark room at the Gaul's hands; but all that seemed to
her far more endurable than the tenderness