d in the fancied contemplation of
the girl's body still lying before her, and her hands writhed beneath
their bonds in the effort to repossess themselves of the knife and
strike again. But soon all sounds ceased to proceed from her lips,
save the loud, thick, irregular breathings, which showed that she was
yet conscious and yet lived.

Meanwhile the madman had passed into the inner recess of the temple,
and had drawn the shutter over the opening in the wall, through which
light had been admitted into the place when Numerian and Antonina first
entered it. Even the black chasm formed by the mouth of the vault of
the dragon now disappeared, with all other objects, in the thick
darkness. But no obscurity could confuse the senses of Ulpius in the
temple, whose every corner he visited in his restless wanderings by
night and by day alike. Led as if by a mysterious penetration of
sight, he traced his way unerringly to the entrance of the vault, knelt
down before it, and placing his hands on the first of the steps by
which it was descended, listened, breathless and attentive, to the
sounds that rose from the abyss--listened, rapt and unmoving, a
formidable and unearthly figure--like a magician waiting for a voice
from the oracles of Hell--like a spirit of Night looking down into the
mid-caverns of the earth, and watching the mysteries of subterranean
creation, the giant pulses of Action and Heat, which are the
life-springs of the rolling world.

The fitful wind whistled up, wild and plaintive; the river chafed and
bubbled through the iron grating below; the loose scales of the dragon
clashed as the night breezes reached them: and these sounds were still
to him as the language of his gods, which filled him with a fearful
rapture, and inspired him, in the terrible degradation of his being, as
with a new soul. He listened and listened yet. Fragments of wild
fancies--the vain yearnings of the disinherited mind to recover its
divine birthright of boundless thought--now thrilled through him, and
held him still and speechless where he knelt.

But at length, through the gloomy silence of the recess, he heard the
voice of Goisvintha raised once more, and in hoarse, wild tones calling
aloud for light and help. The agony of pain and suspense, the awful
sense of darkness and stillness, of solitary bondage and slow torment,
had at last effected that which no open peril, no common menace of
violent death could have produced. She yi