us form; his eye grew cunning
and suspicious; a stealthy deliberation and watchfulness appeared in
all his actions. He now slowly lifted his foot from Goisvintha's
breast, and raised his hands at the same time to strike her back if she
should attempt to escape. Seeing that she lay senseless from her fall,
he left her; retired to one of the corners of the temple, took from it
a rope that lay there, and returning, bound her arms behind her at the
hands and wrists. The rope cut deep through the skin--the pain
restored her to her senses; she suffered the sharp agony in her own
body, in the same place where she had inflicted it on the young
chieftain at the farm-house beyond the suburbs.

The minute after, she felt herself dragged along the ground, farther
into the interior of the building. The madman drew her up to the iron
gates of the passage through the partition, and fastening the end of
the rope to them, left her there. This part of the temple was
enveloped in total darkness--her assailant addressed not a word to
her--she could not obtain even a glimpse of his form, but she could
hear him still laughing to himself in hoarse, monotonous tones, that
sounded now near, and now distant again.

She abandoned herself as lost--prematurely devoted to the torment and
death that she had anticipated; but, as yet, her masculine resolution
and energy did not decline. The very intensity of the anguish she
suffered from the bindings at her wrists, producing a fierce bodily
effort to resist it, strengthened her iron-strung nerves. She neither
cried for help nor appealed to the Pagan for pity. The gloomy fatalism
which she had inherited from her savage ancestors sustained her in a
suicide-pride.

Ere long the laughter of Ulpius, while he moved slowly hither and
thither in the darkness of the temple, was overpowered by the sound of
her voice--deep, groaning, but yet steady--as she uttered her last
words--words poured forth like the wild dirges, the fierce death-songs
of the old Goths when they died deserted on the bloody battle-field, or
were cast bound into deep dungeons, a prey to the viper and the asp.
Thus she spoke:-- 'I swore to be avenged! while I went forth from
Aquileia with the child that was killed and the child that was wounded;
while I climbed the high wall in the night-time, and heard the tumult
of the beating waves near the bank where I buried the dead; while I
wandered in the darkness over the naked heath and th