of earth by which it was surrounded! Her hair waved idly about her
cheeks, as the light wind fluttered it; but no expression passed over
her face, no gestures escaped her limbs. Her mind toiled and quivered,
as if crushed by a fiery burden; but her heart was voiceless, and her
body was still.

Ulpius had stood unnoticed by her side. At this moment he moved so as
to confront her, and she suddenly looked up at him. A momentary
expression of bewilderment and suspicion lightened the heavy vacancy of
despair which had chased their natural and feminine tenderness from her
eyes, but it disappeared rapidly. She turned from the Pagan, knelt
down by the grave, and pressed her face and bosom against the little
mound of turf beneath her.

No voice comforted her, no arm caressed her, as her mind now began to
penetrate the mysteries, to probe the darkest depths of the long
night's calamities! Unaided and unsolaced, while the few and waning
stars glimmered from their places in the sky, while the sublime
stillness of tranquillised Nature stretched around her, she knelt at
the altar of death, and raised her soul upward to the great heaven
above her, charged with its sacred offering of human grief!

Long did she thus remain; and when at length she arose from the ground,
when, approaching the Pagan, she fixed on him her tearless, dreary
eyes, he quailed before her glance, as his dull faculties struggled
vainly to resume the old, informing power that they had now for ever
lost. Nothing but the remembrance aroused by his first sight of the
fragment of the lute lived within even yet, as he whispered to her in
low, entreating tones--

'Come home--come home! Your father may return before us--come home!'

As the words 'home' and 'father'--those household gods of the heart's
earliest existence--struck upon her ears, a change flashed with
electric suddenness over the girl's whole aspect. She raised her wan
hands to the sky; all her woman's tenderness repossessed itself of her
heart; and as she again knelt down over the grave, her sobs rose
audibly through the calmed and fragrant air.

With Hermanric's corpse beneath her, with the blood-sprinkled room
behind her, with a hostile army and a famine-wasted city beyond her, it
was only through that flood of tears, that healing passion of gentle
emotions, that she rose superior to the multiplied horrors of her
situation at the very moment when her faculties and her life seemed
sinking u