Scorning to punish a
woman whom he regarded as insane for an absence from the tents of the
Goths which was of no moment wither to the army or to himself, Alaric
had impatiently dismissed her from his presence when she was brought
before him. The soldiers who had returned to bury the body of their
chieftain in the garden of the farm-house, found means to inform her
secretly of the charitable act which they had performed at their own
peril, but beyond this no further intercourse was held with her by any
of her former associates.
All her actions favoured their hasty belief that her faculties were
disordered, and others shunned her as she shunned them. Her daily
allowance of food was left for her to seek at a certain place in the
camp, as it might have been left for an animal too savage to be
cherished by the hand of man. At certain periods she returned secretly
from her wanderings to take it. Her shelter for the night was not the
shelter of her people before the walls of Rome; her thoughts were not
their thoughts.
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