t to accomplish successfully the fatal
spring, when a sound in the east--faint, distant, and fugitive--caught
her ear. In an instant her eye brightened, her chest heaved, her cheek
flushed. She exerted the last relics of her wasted strength to gain a
prominent position upon a ledge of the rocks behind her, and waited in
an agony of expectation for a repetition of that magic sound.

In a moment more she heard it again--for the child, stupefied with
terror at the action that had accompanied her determination to plunge
with him into the lake, now kept silence, and she could listen
undisturbed. To unpractised ears the sound that so entranced her would
have been scarcely audible. Even the experienced traveller would have
thought it nothing more than the echo of a fallen stone among the rocks
in the eastward distance. But to her it was no unimportant sound, for
it gave the welcome signal of deliverance and delight.

As the hour wore on, it came nearer and nearer, tossed about by the
sportive echoes, and now clearly betraying that its origin was, as she
had at first divined, the note of the Gothic trumpet. Soon the distant
music ceased, and was succeeded by another sound, low and rumbling, as
of an earthquake afar off or a rising thunderstorm, and changing, ere
long, to a harsh confused noise, like the rustling of a mighty wind
through whole forests of brushwood.

At this instant the woman lost all command over herself; her former
patience and caution deserted her; reckless of danger, she placed the
child upon the ledge on which she had been standing; and, though
trembling in every limb, succeeded in mounting so much higher on the
crag as to gain a fissure near the top of the rock, which commanded an
uninterrupted view of the vast tracts of uneven ground leading in an
easterly direction to the next range of precipices and ravines.

One after another the long minutes glided on, and, though much was
still audible, nothing was yet to be seen. At length the shrill sound
of the trumpet again rang through the dull, misty air, and the next
instant the advance guard of an army of Goths emerged from the distant
woods.

Then, after an interval, the multitudes of the main body thronged
through every outlet in the trees, and spread in dusky masses over the
desert ground that lay between the woods and the rocks about the
borders of the lake. The front ranks halted, as if to communicate with
the crowds of the rearguard and the