ce and threatening
demeanour, she suddenly rose up. Her reason seemed crushed within her
as she looked with frantic earnestness from Vetranio to her father, and
then back again from her father to Vetranio. On one side she saw an
enemy who had ruined her she knew not how, and who threatened her with
she knew not what; on the other, a parent who had cast her off. For
one instant she directed a final look on the room, that, sad and lonely
though it was, had still been a home to her; and then, without a word
or a sigh, she turned, and crouching like a beaten dog, fled from the
house.

During the whole of the scene Vetranio had stood so fixed in the
helpless astonishment of intoxication as to be incapable of moving or
uttering a word. All that took place during the short and terrible
interview between father and child utterly perplexed him. He heard no
loud, violent anger on one side, no clamorous petitioning for
forgiveness on the other. The stern old man whom Antonina had called
father, and who had been pointed out to him as the most austere
Christian in Rome, far from avenging his intrusion on Antonina's
slumber, had voluntarily abandoned his daughter to his licentious will.
That the anger or irony of so severe a man should inspire such an
action as this, or that Numerian, like his servant, was plotting to
obtain some strange mysterious favour from him by using Antonina as a
bribe, seemed perfectly impossible. All that passed before the senator
was, to his bewildered imagination, thoroughly incomprehensible.
Frivolous, thoughtless, profligate as he might be, his nature was not
radically base, and when the scene of which he had been the astounded
witness was abruptly terminated by the flight of Antonina, the look of
frantic misery fixed on him by the unfortunate girl at the moment of
her departure, almost sobered him for the instant, as he stood before
the now solitary father gazing vacantly around him with emotions of
uncontrollable confusion and dismay.

Meanwhile a third person was now approaching to join the two occupants
of the bedchamber abandoned by its ill-fated mistress. Although in the
subterranean retreat to which he had retired on leaving Vetranio,
Ulpius had not noticed the silent entrance of the master of the house,
he had heard through the open doors the sound, low though it was, of
the Christian's voice. As he rose, suspecting all things and prepared
for every emergency, to ascend to the bedchamb