Lake of the Dead--worship! I have looked on the
river whose black current roars and howls in its course through the
caves of everlasting night--worship! I have seen the furies lashed by
serpents on their wrinkled necks, and followed them as they hurled
their torches over the pining ghosts! I have stood unmoved in the
hurricane-tumult of hell--worship! worship! worship!'

He turned round again towards the altar of idols, calling upon his gods
to proclaim his deification, and at the moment when he moved,
Goisvintha sprang forward. Antonina was kneeling with her face turned
from the door, as the assassin seized her by her long hair and drove
the knife into her neck. The moaning accents of the girl, bewailing her
approaching fate, closed in one faint groan; she stretched out her
arms, and fell forward over her father's body.

In the ferocious triumph of the moment, Goisvintha raised her arm to
repeat the stroke; but at that instant the madman looked round. 'The
sacrifice--the sacrifice!' he shouted, leaping at one spring like a
wild beast at her throat. She struck ineffectually at him with the
knife, as he fastened his long nails in her flesh and hurled her
backwards to the floor. Then he yelled and gibbered in frantic
exultation, set his foot on her breast, and spat on her as she lay
beneath him.

The contact of the girl's body when she fell--the short but terrible
tumult of the attack that passed almost over him--the shrill, deafening
cries of the madman, awoke Numerian from his trance of despairing
remembrance, aroused him in his agony of supplicating prayer. He
looked up.

The scene that met his eyes was one of those scenes which crush every
faculty but the faculty of mechanical action--before which, thought
vanishes from men's minds, utterance is suspended on their lips,
expression is paralysed on their faces. The coldness of the tomb
seemed breathed over Numerian's aspect by the contemplation of the
terrible catastrophe: his eyes were glassy and vacant, his lips parted
and rigid; even the remembrance of the discovery of his brother seemed
lost to him as he stooped over his daughter and bound a fragment of her
robe round her neck. The mute, soulless, ghastly stillness of death
looked settled on his features, as, unconscious now of weakness or age,
he rose with her in his arms, stood motionless for one moment before
the doorway, and looked slowly round on Ulpius; then he moved forward
with heavy regular