metimes heard faintly
from the principal streets, and the distant noises of martial music
sounded cheerily from the Gothic camp as the sentinels were posted
along the line of watch; but soon these noises ceased, and the
stillness of Rome was as the stillness round the couch of the wounded
girl.

Day after day, and night after night, since the assassination in the
temple, Numerian had kept the same place by his daughter's side. Each
hour as it passed found him still absorbed in his long vigil of hope;
his life seemed suspended in its onward course by the one influence
that now enthralled it. At the brief intervals when his bodily
weariness overpowered him on his melancholy watch, it was observed by
those around him that, even in his short dreaming clumbers, his face
remained ever turned in the same direction, towards the head of the
couch, as if drawn thither by some irresistible attraction, by some
powerful ascendancy, felt even amid the deepest repose of sensation,
the heaviest fatigue of the overlaboured mind, and worn, sinking heart.
He held no communication, save by signs, with the friends about him; he
seemed neither to hope, to doubt, nor to despair with them; all his
faculties were strung up to vibrate at one point only, and were dull
and unimpressible in every other direction.

But twice had he been heard to speak more than the fewest, simplest
words. The first time, when Antonina uttered the name of Goisvintha,
on the recovery of her senses after her wound, he answered eagerly by
reiterated declarations that there was nothing henceforth to fear; for
he had seen the assassin dead under the Pagan's foot on leaving the
temple. The second time, when mention was incautiously made before him
of rumours circulated through Rome of the burning of an unknown Pagan
priest, hidden in the temple of Serapis, with vast treasures around
him, the old man was seen to start and shudder, and heard to pray for
the soul that was now waiting before the dread judgment-seat; to murmur
about a vain restoration and a discovery made too late; to mourn over
horror that thickened round him, over hope fruitlessly awakened, and
bereavement more terrible than mortal had ever suffered before; to
entreat that the child, the last left of all, might be spared--with
many words more, which ran on themes like these, and which were counted
by all who listened to them but as the wanderings of a mind whose
higher powers were fatally prostrated by