d higher his altar of
idols, and pouring forth his invocations before his gods in the place
of the sacrifice; and now, at the moment when he was most triumphant in
his ferocious activity of purpose, when his fancied bondman and his
fancied victim were most helpless at his command--now, when his
strained faculties were strung to their highest pitch, the
long-deferred paroxysm had seized him, which was the precursor of his
repose, of the only repose granted by his awful fate--a change (the
mournful change already described) in the form of his insanity. For at
those rare periods when he slept, his sleep was not unconsciousness,
not rest: it was a trance of hideous dreams--his tongue spoke, his
limbs moved, when he slumbered as when he woke. It was only when his
visions of the pride, the power, the fierce conflicts, and daring
resolutions of his maturer years gave place to his dim, quiet, waking
dreams of his boyish days, that his wasted faculties reposed, and his
body rested with them in the motionless languor of perfect fatigue.
Then, if words were still uttered by his lips, they were as murmurs of
an infant--happy sleep; for the innocent phrases of his childhood which
they then revived, seemed for a time to bring with them the innocent
tranquillity of his childhood as well.

'Go! go!--fly while you are yet free!' cried Numerian, dropping the
hand of Antonina, and pointing to the door. But for the second time
the girl refused to move forward a step. No horror, no peril in the
temple could banish for an instant her remembrance of the night at the
farm-house in the suburbs. She kept her head turned towards the vacant
entrance, fixed her eyes on it in the unintermitting watchfulness of
terror, and whispered affrightedly, 'Goisvintha! Goisvintha!' when her
father spoke.

The clasp of the Pagan's fingers remained fixed and deathlike as at
first; he leaned back against the wall, as still as if life and action
had for ever departed from him. The paroxysm had passed away; his
face, distorted but the moment before, was now in repose, but it was a
repose that was awful to look on. Tears rolled slowly from his
half-closed eyes over his seamed and wrinkled cheeks--tears which were
not the impressive expression of mental anguish (for a vacant and
unchanging smile was on his lips), but the mere mechanical outburst of
the physical weakness that the past crisis of agony had left behind it.
Not the slightest appearance of thou