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.
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