and love--did he seek, night
after night, Antonina's presence. His passion, though it denied him to
his warrior duties, wrought not deteriorating change in his
disposition. All that it altered in him it altered nobly. It varied
and exalted his rude emotions, for it was inspired, not alone by the
beauty and youth that he saw, but by the pure thoughts, the artless
eloquence that he heard. And she--the forsaken daughter, the source
whence the Northern warrior derived those new and higher sensations
that had never animated him until now--regarded her protector, her
first friend and companion, as her first love, with a devotion which,
in its mingled and exalted nature, may be imagined by the mind, but can
be but imperfectly depicted by the pen. It was a devotion created of
innocence and gratitude, of joy and sorrow, of apprehension and hope.
It was too fresh, too unworldly to own any upbraidings of artificial
shame, any self-reproaches of artificial propriety. It resembled in
its essence, though not in its application, the devotion of the first
daughters of the Fall to their brother-lords.

But it is now time that we return to the course of our narrative;
although, ere we again enter on the stirring and rapid present, it will
be necessary for a moment more to look back in another direction to the
eventful past.

But it is not on peace, beauty, and pleasure that our observation now
fixes itself. It is to anger, disease, and crime--to the unappeasable
and unwomanly Goisvintha, that we now revert.

Since the day when the violence of her conflicting emotions had
deprived her of consciousness, at the moment of her decisive triumph
over the scruples of Hermanric and the destiny of Antonina, a raging
fever had visited on her some part of those bitter sufferings that she
would fain have inflicted on others. Part of the time she lay in a
raving delirium; part of the time in helpless exhaustion; but she never
forgot, whatever the form assumed by her disease, the desperate purpose
in the pursuit of which she had first incurred it. Slowly and
doubtfully her vigour at length returned to her, and with it
strengthened and increased the fierce ambition of vengeance that
absorbed her lightest thoughts and governed her most careless actions.

Report informed her of the new position, on the line of blockade, on
which Hermanric was posted, and only enumerated as the companions of
his sojourn the warriors sent thither under his com