ing night flowed onward to the two watchers in the lonely house!
How gladly the delighted girl disclosed her hidden thoughts, and poured
forth her innocent confessions, to the dweller among other nations and
the child of other impressions than her own! All the various
reflections aroused in her mind by the natural objects she had secretly
studied, by the mighty imagery of her Bible lore, by the gloomy
histories of saints' visions and martyrs' sufferings, which she had
learnt and pondered over by her father's side, were now drawn from
their treasured places in her memory, and addressed to the ear of the
Goth. As the child flies to the nurse with the story of its first toy;
as the girl resorts to the sister with the confession of her first
love; as the poet hurries to the friend with the plan of his first
composition; so did Antonina seek the attention of Hermanric with the
first outward revealings enjoyed by her faculties and the first
acknowledgment of her emotions liberated from her heart.

The longer the Goth listened to her, the more perfect became the
enchantment of her words, half struggling into poetry, and her voice
half gliding into music. As her low, still, varying tones wound
smoothly into his ear, his thoughts suddenly and intuitively reverted
to her formerly expressed remembrances of her lost lute, inciting him
to ask her, with new interest and animation, of the manner of her
acquisition of that knowledge of song, which she had already assured
him that she possessed.

'I have learned many odes of many poets,' said she, quickly and
confusedly avoiding the mention of Vetranio, which a direct answer to
Hermanric's question must have produced, 'but I remember none
perfectly, save those whose theme is of spirits and of other worlds,
and of the invisible beauty that we think of but cannot see. Of the
few that I know of these, there is one that I first learned and loved
most. I will sing it, that you may be assured I will not fail to you
in my promised art.'

She hesitated for a moment. Sorrowful remembrances of the events that
had followed the utterance of the last notes she sang in her father's
garden, swelled within her, and held her speechless. Soon, however,
after a short interval of silence, she recovered her self-possession,
and began to sing, in low tremulous tones, that harmonised well with
the character of the words and the strain of the melody which she had
chosen.

THE MISSION OF THE TEAR