While he
was thus engaged, while the remains of the gentleness of his childhood
were thus awfully revived in the insanity of his age, a musical string
wound round a small piece of gilt wood fell from its concealment in her
bosom; he snatched it from the ground--it was the fragment of her broken
lute, which had never quitted her since the night when, in her innocent
grief, she had wept over it in her maiden bed-chamber.
Small, obscure, insignificant as it was, this little token touched the
fibre in the Pagan's shattered mind which the all-eloquent form and
presence of its hapless mistress had failed to reach; his memory flew
back instantly to the garden on the Pincian Mount, and to his past
duties in Numerian's household, but spoke not to him of the calamities
he had wreaked since that period on his confiding master. His
imagination presented to him at this moment but one image--his servitude
in the Christian's abode; and as he now looked on the girl he could
regard himself but in one light--as 'the guardian restored'.
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