found yet more--a companion and a friend!'

She looked up at the young Goth as she pronounced these words with the
same grateful expression that had appeared on her countenance before;
but this time her eyes were not dimmed by tears. Already her
disposition--poor as was the prospect of happiness which now lay before
it--had begun to return, with an almost infantine facility of change,
to the restoring influences of the brighter emotions. Already the short
tranquilities of the present began to exert for her their effacing
charm over the long agitations of the past. Despair was unnumbered
among the emotions that grew round that child-like heart; shame, fear,
and grief, however they might overshadow it for a time, left no taint
of their presence on its bright, fine surface. Tender, perilously alive
to sensation, strangely retentive of kindness as she was by nature, the
very solitude to which she had been condemned had gifted her, young as
she was, with a martyr's endurance of ill, and with a stoic's patience
under pain.

'Do not mourn for me now,' she pursued, gently interrupting some broken
expressions of compassion which fell from the lips of the young Goth.
'If you are merciful to me, I shall forget all that I have suffered!
Though your nation is at enmity with mine, while you remain my friend,
I fear nothing! I can look on your great stature, and heavy sword, and
bright armour now without trembling! You are not like the soldiers of
Rome;--you are taller, stronger, more gloriously arrayed! You are like
a statue I once saw by chance of a warrior of the Greeks! You have a
look of conquest and a presence of command!'

She gazed on the manly and powerful frame of the young warrior, clothed
as it was in the accoutrements of his warlike nation, with an
expression of childish interest and astonishment, asking him the
appellation and use of each part of his equipment, as it attracted her
attention, and ending her inquiries by eagerly demanding his name.

'Hermanric,' she repeated, as he answered her, pronouncing with some
difficulty the harsh Gothic syllables--'Hermanric!--that is a stern,
solemn name--a name fit for a warrior and a man! Mine sounds
worthless, after such a name as that! It is only Antonina!'

Deeply as he was interested in every word uttered by the girl,
Hermanric could no longer fail to perceive the evident traces of
exhaustion that now appeared in the slightest of her actions.
Producing some furs