cup from it, rolled from his hand to the floor. The
stare of death was in his face as he half-raised himself and for one
instant looked steadily on his companion; the moment after, without
word or groan, he dropped backward over his couch.

The contest of the night was decided! The host of the banquet and the
master of the palace had been reserved to end the one and to fire the
other!

A smile of malignant triumph parted Vetranio's lips as he now arose and
extinguished the last lamp burning besides his own. That done, he
grasped the torch. His eyes, as he raised it, wandered dreamily over
the array of his treasures, and the forms of his dead or insensible
fellow-patricians around him, to be consumed by his act in annihilating
fire. The sensation of his solemn night-solitude in his fated palace
began to work in vivid and varying impressions on his mind, which was
partially recovering some portion of its wonted acuteness, under the
bodily reaction now produced in him by the very extravagance of the
night's excess. His memory began to retrace confusedly the scenes with
which the dwelling that he was about to destroy had been connected at
distant or at recent periods. At one moment the pomp of former
banquets, the jovial congregation of guests since departed or dead,
revived before him; at another, he seemed to be acting over again his
secret departure from his dwelling on the night before his last feast,
his stealthy return with the corpse that he had dragged from the
street, his toil in setting it up in mockery behind the black curtain,
and inventing the dialogue to be spoken before it by the hunchback.
Now his thoughts reverted to the minutest circumstances of the
confusion and dismay among the members of his household when the first
extremities of the famine began to be felt in the city; and now,
without visible connection or cause, they turned suddenly to the
morning when he had hurried through the most solitary paths in his
grounds to meet the betrayer Ulpius at Numerian's garden gate. Once
more the image of Antonina--so often present to his imagination since
the original was lost to his eyes--grew palpable before him. He
thought of her, as listening at his knees to the sound of his lute; as
awakening, bewildered and terrified, in his arms; as flying
distractedly before her father's wrath; as now too surely lying dead,
in her beauty and her innocence, amid the thousand victims of the
famine and the plague.