e remains of the gentleness of his childhood
were thus awfully revived in the insanity of his age, a musical string
wound round a small piece of gilt wood fell from its concealment in her
bosom; he snatched it from the ground--it was the fragment of her
broken lute, which had never quitted her since the night when, in her
innocent grief, she had wept over it in her maiden bed-chamber.

Small, obscure, insignificant as it was, this little token touched the
fibre in the Pagan's shattered mind which the all-eloquent form and
presence of its hapless mistress had failed to reach; his memory flew
back instantly to the garden on the Pincian Mount, and to his past
duties in Numerian's household, but spoke not to him of the calamities
he had wreaked since that period on his confiding master. His
imagination presented to him at this moment but one image--his
servitude in the Christian's abode; and as he now looked on the girl he
could regard himself but in one light--as 'the guardian restored'.

'What does she with her music here?' he whispered apprehensively.
'This is not her father's house, and the garden yonder looks not from
the summit of the hill!'

As he curiously examined the room, the red spots on the floor suddenly
attracted his attention. A panic, a frantic terror seemed instantly to
overwhelm him. He rose with a cry of horror, and, still holding the
girl on his arm, hurried out into the garden trembling and breathless,
as if the weapon of an assassin had scared him from the house.

The shock of her rough removal, the sudden influence of the fresh, cold
air, restored Antonina to the consciousness of life at the moment when
Ulpius, unable to support her longer, laid her against the little heap
of turf which marked the position of the young chieftain's grave. Her
eyes opened wildly; their first glance fixed upon the shattered door
and the empty room. She rose from the ground, advanced a few steps
towards the house, then paused, rigid, breathless, silent, and, turning
slowly, faced the upturned turf.

The grave was all-eloquent of its tenant. His cuirass, which the
soldiers had thought to bury with the body that it had defended in
former days, had been overlooked in the haste of the secret interment,
and lay partly imbedded in the broken earth, partly exposed to view--a
simple monument over a simple grave! Her tearless, dilated eyes looked
down on it as though they would number each blade of grass, each morsel