ds, in the mellow stillness of
evening; he imagined her sleeping, soft and warm and still, in his
protecting arms--ever happy and ever gentle; girl in years, and woman
in capacities; at once lover and companion, teacher and pupil, follower
and guide!

Such she might have been once! What was she now?

Was she sinking under her loneliness, perishing from exposure and
fatigue, repulsed by the cruel, or mocked by the unthinking? To all
these perils and miseries had he exposed her; and to what end? To
maintain the uncertain favour, to preserve the unwelcome friendship, of
a woman abandoned even by the most common and intuitive virtues of her
sex; whose frantic craving for revenge, confounded justice with
treachery, innocence with guilt, helplessness with tyranny; whose
claims of nation and relationship should have been forfeited in his
estimation, by the openly-confessed malignity of her designs, at the
fatal moment when she had communicated them to him in all their
atrocity, before the walls of Rome. He groaned in despair, as he
thought on this, the most unworthy of the necessities, to which the
forsaken girl had been sacrificed.

Soon, however, his mind reverted from such reflections as these, to his
own duties and his own renown; and here his remorse became partially
lightened, though his sorrow remained unchanged.

Wonderful as had been the influence of Antonina's presence and
Antonina's words over the Goth, they had not yet acquired power enough
to smother in him entirely the warlike instincts of his sex and nation,
or to vanquish the strong and hostile promptings of education and
custom. She had gifted him with new emotions, and awakened him to new
thought; she had aroused all the dormant gentleness of his disposition
to war against the rugged indifference, the reckless energy, that
teaching and example had hitherto made a second nature to his heart.
She had wound her way into his mind, brightening its dark places,
enlarging its narrow recesses, beautifying its unpolished treasures.
She had created, she had refined, during her short hours of
communication with him, but she had not lured his disposition entirely
from its old habits and its old attachments; she had not yet stripped
off the false glitter from barbarian strife, or the pomp from martial
renown; she had not elevated the inferior intellectual, to the height
of the superior moral faculties, in his inward composition. Submitted
almost impartially t