never mourn, never fear, never weep more! Though you have
lost your father, and the people of your nation are as strangers to
you, though you have been threatened and forsaken, you shall still be
beautiful--still be happy; for I will watch you, and you shall never be
harmed; I will labour for you, and you shall never want! People and
kindred--fame and duty, I will abandon them all to make atonement to
you!'

Its youthful freshness and hope returned to the girl's heart, as water
to the long-parched spring, when the young warrior ceased. The tears
stood in her eyes, but she neither sighed nor spoke. Her frame trembled
all over with the excess of her astonishment and delight, as she still
steadfastly looked on him and still listened intently as he proceeded:--

'Fear, then, no longer for your safety--Goisvintha, whom you dread, is
far from us; she knows not that we are here; she cannot track our
footsteps now, to threaten or to harm you! Remember no more how you
have suffered and I have sinned! Think only how bitterly I have
repented our morning's separation, and how gladly I welcome our meeting
of to-night! Oh, Antonina! you are beautiful with a wondrous
loveliness, you are young with a perfected and unchildlike youth, your
words fall upon my ear with the music of a song of the olden time; it
is like a dream of the spirits that my fathers worshipped, when I look
up and behold you at my side!'

An expression of mingled confusion, pleasure, and surprise, flushed the
girl's half-averted countenance as she listened to the Goth. She rose
with a smile of ineffable gratitude and delight, and pointed to the
prospect beyond, as she softly rejoined:--

'Let us go a little further onward, where the moonlight shines over the
meadow below. My heart is bursting in this shadowy place! Let us seek
the light that is yonder; it seems happy like me!'

They walked forward; and as they went, she told him again of the
sorrows of her past day; of her lonely and despairing progress from his
tent to the solitary house where he had found her in the night, and
where she had resigned herself from the first to meet a death that had
little horror for her then. There was no thought of reproach, no
utterance of complaint, in this renewal of her melancholy narration.
It was solely that she might luxuriate afresh in those delighting
expressions of repentance and devotion, which she knew that it would
call forth from the lips of Hermanric,