removed his grasp from their shoulders, separated them,
and locking the hand of each in his cold, bony fingers, began to speak.

His voice was deep and solemn, but his accents, in their hard,
unvarying tone, seemed to express no human emotion. His eyes, far from
brightening as he spoke, relapsed into a dull, vacant insensibility.
The connection between the action of speech and the accompanying and
explaining action of look which is observable in all men, seemed lost
in him. It was fearful to behold the death-like face, and to listen at
the same moment to the living voice.

'Lo! the votaries come to the temple!' murmured the Pagan. 'The good
servants of the mighty worship gather at the voice of the priest! In
the far provinces, where the enemies of the gods approach to profane
the sacred groves, behold the scattered people congregating by night to
journey to the shrine of Serapis! Adoring thousands kneel beneath the
lofty porticoes, while within, in the secret hall where the light is
dim, where the air quivers round the breathing deities on their
pedestals of gold, the high priest Ulpius reads the destinies of the
future, that are unrolled before his eyes like a book!'

As he ceased, and, still holding the hands of his captives, looked on
them fixedly as ever, his eyes brightened and dilated again; but they
expressed not the slightest recognition either of father or daughter.
The delirium of his imagination had transported him to the temple at
Alexandria; the days were revived when his glory had risen to its
culminating point, when the Christians trembled before him as their
fiercest enemy, and the Pagans surrounded him as their last hope. The
victims of his former and forgotten treachery were but as two among the
throng of votaries allured by the fame of his eloquence, by the
triumphant notoriety of his power to protect the adherents of the
ancient creed.

But it was not always thus that his madness declared itself: there
were moments when it rose to appalling frenzy. Then he imagined
himself to be again hurling the Christian assailants from the topmost
walls of the besieged temple, in that past time when the image of
Serapis was doomed by the Bishop of Alexandria to be destroyed. His
yells of fury, his frantic execrations of defiance were heard afar, in
the solemn silence of pestilence-stricken Rome. Those who, during the
most fatal days of the Gothic blockade, dropped famished on the
pavement before th