'The
sacrifice--the sacrifice!' he shouted, leaping at one spring like a wild
beast at her throat. She struck ineffectually at him with the knife, as
he fastened his long nails in her flesh and hurled her backwards to the
floor. Then he yelled and gibbered in frantic exultation, set his foot
on her breast, and spat on her as she lay beneath him.
The contact of the girl's body when she fell--the short but terrible
tumult of the attack that passed almost over him--the shrill, deafening
cries of the madman, awoke Numerian from his trance of despairing
remembrance, aroused him in his agony of supplicating prayer. He looked
up.
The scene that met his eyes was one of those scenes which crush every
faculty but the faculty of mechanical action--before which, thought
vanishes from men's minds, utterance is suspended on their lips,
expression is paralysed on their faces. The coldness of the tomb seemed
breathed over Numerian's aspect by the contemplation of the terrible
catastrophe: his eyes were glassy and vacant, his lips parted and
rigid; even the remembrance of the discovery of his brother seemed lost
to him as he stooped over his daughter and bound a fragment of her robe
round her neck.
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