For a little while yet she spoke at intervals, but her speech was
fragmentary and incoherent. At one moment she still gloried in her
revenge, at another she exulted in the fancied contemplation of the
girl's body still lying before her, and her hands writhed beneath their
bonds in the effort to repossess themselves of the knife and strike
again. But soon all sounds ceased to proceed from her lips, save the
loud, thick, irregular breathings, which showed that she was yet
conscious and yet lived.
Meanwhile the madman had passed into the inner recess of the temple, and
had drawn the shutter over the opening in the wall, through which light
had been admitted into the place when Numerian and Antonina first
entered it. Even the black chasm formed by the mouth of the vault of
the dragon now disappeared, with all other objects, in the thick
darkness. But no obscurity could confuse the senses of Ulpius in the
temple, whose every corner he visited in his restless wanderings by
night and by day alike. Led as if by a mysterious penetration of sight,
he traced his way unerringly to the entrance of the vault, knelt down
before it, and placing his hands on the first of the steps by which it
was descended, listened, breathless and attentive, to the sounds that
rose from the abyss--listened, rapt and unmoving, a formidable and
unearthly figure--like a magician waiting for a voice from the oracles
of Hell--like a spirit of Night looking down into the mid-caverns of the
earth, and watching the mysteries of subterranean creation, the giant
pulses of Action and Heat, which are the life-springs of the rolling
world.
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