visions that had occupied it until
that moment. He laughed triumphantly.

'The walls of Rome bow to my arm!' he cried, in exulting tones; 'I
pierced them with my good bar of iron! I wound through them with my
bright lantern! Spirits roared on me, and struck me down, and grinned
upon me in the thick darkness, but I passed the wall! The thunder
pealed around me as I crawled along the winding rifts; but I won my way
through them! I came out conquering on the other side! Come, come,
come, come! We will return! I know the track, even in the darkness!
I can outwatch the sentinels! You shall walk in the pathway that I
have broken through the bricks!

The girl's features lost for a moment their expression of grief, and
grew rigid with horror, as she glanced at his fiery eyes, and felt the
fearful suspicion of his insanity darkening over her mind. She stood
powerless, trembling, unresisting, in his grasp, without attempting to
delude him into departure or to appease him into delay.

'Why did I make my passage through the wall?' muttered the Pagan in a
low, awe-struck voice, suddenly checking himself, as he was about to
step forward. 'Why did I tear down the strong brick-work and go forth
into the dark suburbs?'

He paused, and for a few moments struggled with his purposeless and
disconnected thoughts; but a blank, a darkness, an annihilation
overwhelmed Alaric and the Gothic camp, which he vainly endeavoured to
disperse. He sighed bitterly to himself--'It is gone!' and still
grasping Antonina by the hand, drew her after him to the garden gate.

'Leave me!' she shrieked, as he passed onward into the pathway that led
to the high-road. 'Oh, be merciful, and leave me to die where he has
died!'

'Peace! or I will rend you limb by limb, as I rent the stones from the
wall when I passed through it!' he whispered to her in fierce accents,
as she struggled to escape him. 'You shall return with me to Rome!
You shall walk in the track that I have made in the rifted brick-work!'

Terror, anguish, exhaustion, overpowered her weak efforts. Her lips
moved, partly in prayer and partly in ejaculation; but she spoke in
murmurs only, as she mechanically suffered the Pagan to lead her onward
by the hand.

They paced on under the waning starlight, over the cold, lonely road,
and through the dreary and deserted suburbs,--a fearful and discordant
pair! Coldly, obediently, impassively, as if she were walking in a
dream, the s