Holding the torch high above his head, as the footsteps came nearer, he
fixed his eyes in intense expectation upon the door. It opened, and the
figure of a young girl clothed in white stood before him. One moment he
looked upon her with startled eyes; the next the torch dropped from his
hand, and smouldered unheeded on the marble floor. It was Antonina!
Her face was overspread with a strange transparent paleness; her once
soft, round cheeks had lost their girlish beauty of form; her
expression, ineffably mournful, hopeless, and subdued, threw a simple,
spiritual solemnity over her whole aspect. She was changed, awfully
changed to the profligate senator from the being of his former
admiration; but still there remained in her despairing eyes enough of
the old look of gentleness and patience, surviving through all anguish
and dread, to connect her, even as she was now, with what she had been.
She stood in the chamber of debauchery and suicide between the funeral
pile and the desperate man who was vowed to fire it, a feeble, helpless
creature, yet powerful in the influence of her presence, at such a
moment and in such a form, as a saving and reproving spirit, armed with
the omnipotence of Heaven to mould the purposes of man.
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