seen, sometimes prostrate on the higher places of the
breach, while her fearful guide descended before her into a chasm
beyond, and then turned to drag her after him to a darker and a lower
depth yet; sometimes bent in supplication, when her lips moved once
more with a last despairing entreaty, and her limbs trembled with a
final effort to escape from her captor's relentless grasp. While
still, through all that opposed him, the same fierce tenacity of
purpose would have been invariably visible in every action of Ulpius,
constantly confirming him in his mad resolution to make his victim the
follower of his progress through the wall, ever guiding him with a
strange instinct through every hindrance, and preserving him from every
danger in his path, until it brought him forth triumphant, with his
prisoner still in his power, again free to tread the desolate streets
and mingle with the famine-stricken citizens of Rome.

And now when, after peril and anguish, she once more stood within the
city of her home, what hope remained to Antonina of obtaining her last
refuge under her father's roof, and deriving her solitary consolation
from the effort to regain her father's love? With the termination of
his passage through the breach in the wall had ended every recollection
associated with it in the Pagan's shattered memory. A new blank now
pervaded his lost faculties, desolate as that which had overwhelmed
them in the night when he first stood in the farm-house garden by the
young chieftain's grave. He moved onward, unobservant, unthinking,
without aim or hope, driven by a mysterious restlessness, forgetting
the very presence of Antonina as she followed him, but still
mechanically grasping her hand, and dragging her after him he knew not
whither.

And she, on her part, made no effort more for deliverance. She had
seen the sentinel unmoved by her entreaties, she had seen the walls of
her father's house receding from her longing eyes, as Ulpius pitilessly
hurried her father and farther from its distant door; and she lost the
last faint hope of restoration, the last lingering desire of life, as
the sense of her helplessness now weighed heaviest on her mind. Her
heart was full of her young warrior, who had been slain, and of her
father, from whom she had parted in the hour of his wrath, as she now
feebly followed the Pagan's steps, and resigned herself to a speedy
exhaustion and death in her utter despair.

They turned from t