urned sods of the chieftain's grave and the red
gleam of the fire as it glowed from the dreary room through the gap of
the shattered door.

His faculties were fatally disordered rather than utterly destroyed.
His penetration, his firmness, and his cunning were gone; but a wreck
of memory, useless and unmanageable--a certain capacity for momentary
observation still remained to him. The shameful miscarriage in the
tent of Alaric, which had overthrown his faculties, had passed from him
as an event that never happened, but he remembered fragments of his
past existence--he still retained a vague consciousness of the ruling
purpose of his whole life.

These embryo reflections, disconnected and unsustained, flitted to and
fro over his dark mind as luminous exhalations over a marsh--rising and
sinking, harmless and delusive, fitful and irregular. What he
remembered of the past he remembered carelessly, viewing it with as
vacant a curiosity as if it were the visionary spectacle of another
man's struggles and misfortunes and hopes, acting under it as under a
mysterious influence, neither the end nor the reason of which he cared
to discover. For the future, it was to his thoughts a perfect blank;
for the present, it was a jarring combination of bodily weariness and
mental repose.

He shuddered as he stood shelterless under the open heaven. The cold,
that he had defied in the vaults of the rifted wall, pierced in the
farm-house garden; his limbs, which had resisted repose on the hard
journey from Rome to the camp of the Goths, now trembled so that he was
fain to rest them on the ground. For a short time he sat glaring with
vacant and affrighted eyes upon the open dwelling before him, as though
he longed to enter it but dare not. At length the temptation of the
ruddy firelight seemed to vanquish his irresolution; he rose with
difficulty, and slowly and hesitatingly entered the house.

He had advanced, thief-like, but a few steps, he had felt but for a
moment the welcome warmth of the fire, when the figure of Antonina,
still extended insensible upon the floor, caught his eye; he approached
it with eager curiosity, and, raising the girl on his arm, looked at
her with a long and rigid scrutiny.

For some moments no expression of recognition passed his lips or
appeared on his countenance, as, with a mechanical, doting gesture of
fondness, he smoothed her dishevelled hair over her forehead. While he
was thus engaged, while th