host-like occupant of the hall. As he stood
in fixed attention before the motionless figure, it soon began to be
endowed with the same strange influence over his will, that the lonely
house had already exerted. He advanced slowly towards the crouching
form.

It never stirred at the noise of his approach. The pale hand still
held the mantle over the compressed figure, with the same rigid
immobility of grasp. Brave as he was, Hermanric shuddered as he bent
down and touched the bloodless, icy fingers. At that action, as if
endowed with instant vitality from contact with a living being, the
figure suddenly started up.

Then, the folds of the dark mantle fell back, disclosing a face as pale
in hue as the stone pillars around it; and the voice of the solitary
being became audible, uttering in faint, monotonous accents, these
words:--

'He has forgotten and abandoned me!--slay me if you will!--I am ready
to die!'

Broken, untuned as it was, there yet lurked in that voice a tone of its
old music, there beamed in that vacant and heavy eye a ray of its
native gentleness. With a sudden exclamation of compassion and
surprise, the Goth stepped forward, raised the trembling outcast in his
arms; and, in the impulse of the moment quitting the solitary house,
stood the next instant on the firm earth, and under the starry sky,
once more united to the charge that he had abandoned--to Antonina whom
he had lost.

He spoke to her, caressed her, entreated her pardon, assured her of his
future care; but she neither answered nor recognised him. She never
looked in his face, never moved in his arms, never petitioned for
mercy. She gave no sign of life or being, saving that she moaned at
regular intervals in piteous accents:--'He has forgotten and abandoned
me!' as if that one simple expression comprised in itself, her
acknowledgment of the uselessness of her life, and her dirge for her
expected death.

The Goth's countenance whitened to his very lips. He began to fear
that her faculties had sunk under her trials. He hurried on with her
with trembling steps towards the open country, for he nourished a
dreamy, intuitive hope, that the sight of those woods and fields and
mountains which she had extolled to him, in her morning's entreaty for
protection, might aid in restoring her suspended consciousness, if she
now looked on them.

He ran forward, until he had left the suburbs at least half a mile
behind him, and had reached an em