Such was the communion in which father and daughter passed the hours of
their short reprieve from the judgment of famine pronounced against the
city of their sojourn; so did they live, as it were, in a quiet interval
of existence, in a tranquil pause between the toil that is over and the
toil that is to come in the hard labour of life.
But the term to these short days of repose after long suffering and
grief was fast approaching. The little hoard of provision diminished as
rapidly as the stores that had been anxiously collected before it; and,
on the morning of the second embassy to Alaric, the flask of wine and
the bowl of food were both emptied. The brief dream of security was
over and gone; the terrible realities of the struggle for life had begun
again!
Where or to whom could they now turn for help? The siege still
continued; the food just exhausted was the last food that had been left
on the senator's table; to seek the palace again would be to risk
refusal, perhaps insult, as the result of a second entreaty for aid,
where all power of conferring it might now but too surely be lost.
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