pirit-broken girl moved by the side of her scarce-human
leader. Disjointed exclamation, alternating horribly between infantine
simplicity and fierce wickedness, poured incessantly from the Pagan's
lips, but he never addressed himself further to his terror-stricken
companion. So, wending rapidly onward, they gained the Gothic lines;
and here the madman slackened his pace, and paused, beast-like, to
glare around him, as he approached the habitations of men.

Still not opposed by Antonina, whose faculties of observation were
petrified by her terror into perfect inaction, even here, within reach
of the doubtful aid of the enemies of her people, the Pagan crept
forward through the loneliest places of the encampment, and, guided by
the mysterious cunning of his miserable race, eluded successfully the
observation of the drowsy sentinels. Never bewildered by the
darkness--for the moon had gone down--always led by the animal instinct
co-existent with his disease, he passed over the waste ground between
the hostile encampment and the city, and arrived triumphant at the heap
of stones that marked his entrance to the rifted wall.

For one moment he stopped, and turning towards the girl, pointed
proudly to the dark, low breach he was about to penetrate. Then,
drawing her half-fainting form closer to his side, looking up
attentively to the ramparts, and stepping as noiselessly as though turf
were beneath his feet, he entered the dusky rift with his helpless
charge.

As they disappeared in the recesses of the wall, Night--the stormy, the
eventful, the fatal!--reached its last limit; and the famished sentinel
on the fortifications of the besieged city roused himself from his
dreary and absorbing thoughts, for he saw that the new day was dawning
in the east.

CHAPTER 20.

THE BREACH REPASSED.

Slowly and mournfully the sentinel at the rifted wall raised his eyes
towards the eastern clouds as they brightened before the advancing
dawn. Desolate as was the appearance of the dull, misty daybreak, it
was yet the most welcome of all the objects surrounding the starving
soldier on which he could fix his languid gaze. To look back on the
city behind him was to look back on the dreary charnel-house of famine
and death; to look down on the waste ground without the walls was to
look down on the dead body of the comrade of his watch, who, maddened
by the pangs of hunger which he had suffered during the night, had cast
himself from