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If she is here, let her approach and follow me; said the chief of the party in authoritative tones, pausing at the door of the tent. Goisvintha rose. For an instant she stood irresolute.
He turned round again towards the altar of idols, calling upon his gods to proclaim his deification, and at the moment when he moved, Goisvintha sprang forward. Antonina was kneeling with her face turned from the door, as the assassin seized her by her long hair and drove the knife into her neck.
His mind was far away, brooding over the legends of the battle-fields of his ancestors, remembering how, even in the day of victory, they slew themselves if they were crippled in the fray, how they scorned to exist for other interests than the interests of strife, how they mutilated traitors as Goisvintha had mutilated him!
'And this woman, demanded one of his comrades, 'is she to be liberated or secured? He pointed as he spoke to Goisvintha. During the brief scene of the assassination, the very exercise of her faculties seemed to have been suspended. She had never stirred a limb or uttered a word. The Hun recognised her as the woman who had questioned and bribed him at the camp.
The last part of Antonina's address to him, was expressed in the same terms as a past appeal from other lips, and in other accents, which still clung to his memory. The same demand, 'Remember your promise, which had been advanced to urge him to bloodshed, by Goisvintha, was now proffered by Antonina, to lure him to pity.
Once he looked down upon his helpless hands, when the sword rolled heavily from them to the floor. Then his gaze directed itself immovably upon Goisvintha, as she stood at a little distance from him, with her blood-stained knife, silent as himself. There was no fury no defiance not even the passing distortion of physical suffering in his features, as he now looked on her.
Whether she strove to rise and continue her flight; whether she crouched down again under the portico, resigned for one bitter moment to perish by the knife of Goisvintha if Goisvintha were near; to fall once more into the hands of Ulpius if Ulpius were tracking her to her retreat, the crushing sense that she was utterly bereaved of her beloved protector that the friend of her brief days of happiness was lost to her for ever that Hermanric, who had preserved her from death, had been murdered in his youth and his strength by her side, never deserted her.
But, now that she was once more capable of exertion and of crime, he felt that if he would preserve the secret of Antonina's hiding-place and the security of Antonina's life, he must remain to oppose force to force and stratagem to stratagem, when Goisvintha sought him at his post, even at the risk of inflicting, by his absence from the farm-house, all the pangs of anxiety and apprehension on the lonely girl.
Ignorant whether Goisvintha might not be secretly supported by companions in her ceaseless pursuit, he resolved to secure this place for Antonina, as a temporary refuge at least; while standing before it, he should oblige the woman to declare her purpose, if she followed them even there. In a moment he had begun the ascent of the steps, with the exhausted girl by his side.
Yet beneath this outward calm and silence lurked the wildest passions that ever raged against the weak restraint of human will; even the firm self-possession of Goisvintha was shaken when she found herself within the walls of Rome.
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