mself by
her side, she did not address him again.

Thoughts, dreary and appalling beyond any that had occupied it before,
were rising in the mind of the Goth. His inquietude at the encampment
in the suburbs was tranquillity itself compared to the gloom which now
oppressed him. All the evaded dues of his nation, his family, and his
calling; all the suppressed recollections of the martial occupation he
had slighted, and the martial enmities he had disowned, now revived
avengingly in his memory. Yet, vivid as these remembrances were, they
weakened none of those feelings of passionate devotion to Antonina by
which their influence within him had hitherto been overcome. They
existed with them--the old recollections with the new emotions--the
stern rebukings of the warrior's nature with the anxious forebodings of
the lover's heart. And now, his mysterious meeting with Ulpius;
Goisvintha's unexpected return to health; the dreary rising and furious
progress of the night tempest, began to impress his superstitious mind
as a train of unwonted and meaning incidents, destined to mark the
fatal return of his kinswoman's influence over his own actions and
Antonina's fate.

One by one, his memory revived with laborious minuteness every incident
that had attended his different interviews with the Roman girl, from
the first night when she had strayed into his tent to the last happy
evening that he had spent with her at the deserted farm-house. Then
tracing further backwards the course of his existence, he figured to
himself his meeting with Goisvintha among the Italian Alps; his
presence at the death of her last child, and his solemn engagement, on
hearing her recital of the massacre at Aquileia, to avenge her on the
Romans with his own hands. Roused by these opposite pictures of the
past, his imagination peopled the future with images of Antonina again
endangered, afflicted, and forsaken; with visions of the impatient
army, spurred at length into ferocious action, making universal havoc
among the people of Rome, and forcing him back for ever into their
avenging ranks. No decision for resistance or resignation to flight
presented itself to his judgment. Doubt, despair, and apprehension
held unimpeded sway over his impressible but inactive faculties. The
night itself, as he looked forth on it, was not more dark; the wild
thunder, as he listened to it, not more gloomy; the name of Goisvintha,
as he thought on it, not more omino