back to the
times that were gone, he again revealed to her the changing events of
his past life--not as before, with unsteady accents and wandering eyes;
but now with a calmness of voice and a coherence of language which
forbade her to doubt the strange and startling narrative that she heard.

Once more he spoke of the image of his lost brother (as he had parted
from him in his boyhood) still present to his mind; of the country that
he had quitted in after years; of the name that he had changed--from
Cleander to Numerian--to foil his former associates, if they still
pursued him; and of the ardent desire to behold again the companion of
his first home, which now, when his daughter was restored to him, when
no other earthly aspiration but this was unsatisfied, remained at the
close of his life, the last longing wish of his heart.

Such was the communion in which father and daughter passed the hours of
their short reprieve from the judgment of famine pronounced against the
city of their sojourn; so did they live, as it were, in a quiet
interval of existence, in a tranquil pause between the toil that is
over and the toil that is to come in the hard labour of life.

But the term to these short days of repose after long suffering and
grief was fast approaching. The little hoard of provision diminished
as rapidly as the stores that had been anxiously collected before it;
and, on the morning of the second embassy to Alaric, the flask of wine
and the bowl of food were both emptied. The brief dream of security
was over and gone; the terrible realities of the struggle for life had
begun again!

Where or to whom could they now turn for help? The siege still
continued; the food just exhausted was the last food that had been left
on the senator's table; to seek the palace again would be to risk
refusal, perhaps insult, as the result of a second entreaty for aid,
where all power of conferring it might now but too surely be lost.
Such were the thoughts of Antonina as she returned the empty bowl to
its former place; but she gave them no expression in words.

She saw, with horror, that the same expression of despair, almost of
frenzy, which had distorted her father's features on the day of her
restoration to him, now marked them again. Once more he tottered
towards the window, murmuring in his bitter despondency against the
delusive security and hope which had held him idle for the interests of
his child during the few days th