These and other reflections, while they crowded in whirlwind rapidity
on his mind, wrought no alteration in the deadly purpose which they
suspended. His delay in lighting the torch was the unconscious delay
of the suicide, secure in his resolution ere he lifts the poison to his
lips--when life rises before him as a thing that is past, and he stands
for one tremendous moment in the dark gap between the present and the
future--no more the pilgrim of Time--not yet the inheritor of Eternity!

So, in the dimly lighted hall, surrounded by the victims whom he had
hurried before him to their doom, stood the lonely master of the great
palace; and so spoke within him the mysterious voices of his last
earthly thoughts. Gradually they sank and ceased, and stillness and
vacancy closed like dark veils over his mind. Starting like one
awakened from a trance he once more felt the torch in his hand, and
once more the expression of fierce desperation appeared in his eyes as
he lit it steadily at the lamp above him.

The dew was falling pure to the polluted earth; the light breezes sang
their low daybreak anthem among the leaves to the Power that bade them
forth; night had expired, and morning was already born of it, as
Vetranio, with the burning torch in his hand, advanced towards the
funeral pile.

He had already passed the greater part of the length of the room, when
a faint sound of footsteps ascending a private staircase which led to
the palace gardens, and communicated with the lower end of the
banqueting-hall by a small door of inlaid ivory, suddenly attracted his
attention. He hesitated in his deadly purpose, listening to the slow,
regular approaching sound, which, feeble though it was, struck
mysteriously impressive upon his ear in the dreary silence of all
things around him. Holding the torch high above his head, as the
footsteps came nearer, he fixed his eyes in intense expectation upon
the door. It opened, and the figure of a young girl clothed in white
stood before him. One moment he looked upon her with startled eyes;
the next the torch dropped from his hand, and smouldered unheeded on
the marble floor. It was Antonina!

Her face was overspread with a strange transparent paleness; her once
soft, round cheeks had lost their girlish beauty of form; her
expression, ineffably mournful, hopeless, and subdued, threw a simple,
spiritual solemnity over her whole aspect. She was changed, awfully
changed to the profli