Roman you have chosen to the city of
her people! Your life as a warrior is at an end!'

He made her no answer. There are emotions, the last of a life, which
tear back from nature the strongest barriers that custom raises to
repress her, which betray the lurking existence of the first rude
social feeling of the primeval days of a great nation, in the breasts
of their most distant descendants, however widely their acquirements,
their prosperities, or their changes may seem to have morally separated
them from their ancestors of old. Such were the emotions now awakened
in the heart of the Goth. His Christianity, his love, his knowledge of
high aims, and his experience of new ideas, sank and deserted him, as
though he had never known them. He thought on his mutilated hands, and
no other spirit moved within him, but the ancient Gothic spirit of
centuries back; the inspiration of his nation's early Northern songs
and early Northern achievements--the renown of courage and the
supremacy of strength.

Vainly did Antonina, in the midst of the despair that still possessed
her, yearn for a word from his lips or a glance from his eyes; vainly
did her trembling fingers, tearing the bandages from her robe, stanch
the blood on his wounded hands; vainly did her voice call on him to fly
and summon help from his companions in the camp! His mind was far
away, brooding over the legends of the battle-fields of his ancestors,
remembering how, even in the day of victory, they slew themselves if
they were crippled in the fray, how they scorned to exist for other
interests than the interests of strife, how they mutilated traitors as
Goisvintha had mutilated him! Such were the objects that enchained his
inward faculties, while his outward senses were still enthralled by the
horrible fascination that existed for him in the presence of the
assassin by his side. His very consciousness of his existence, though
he moved and breathed, seemed to have ceased.

'You thought to deceive me in my sickness, you hoped to profit by my
death,' resumed Goisvintha, returning contemptuously her victim's
glance. 'You trusted in the night, and the darkness, and the storm;
you were secure in your boldness, in your strength, in the secrecy of
this lurking-place that you have chosen for your treachery, but your
stratagems and your expectations have failed you! At Aquileia I learnt
to be wily and watchful as you! I discovered your desertion of the
warriors