He sat watching Antonina, and touching the
outspread locks of her hair from time to time, as had been his wont. It
was a fair, starry night; the fresh air of the soft winter climate of
the South blew gently over the earth, the great city was sinking fast
into tranquillity, calling voices were sometimes heard faintly from the
principal streets, and the distant noises of martial music sounded
cheerily from the Gothic camp as the sentinels were posted along the
line of watch; but soon these noises ceased, and the stillness of Rome
was as the stillness round the couch of the wounded girl.
Day after day, and night after night, since the assassination in the
temple, Numerian had kept the same place by his daughter's side. Each
hour as it passed found him still absorbed in his long vigil of hope;
his life seemed suspended in its onward course by the one influence that
now enthralled it. At the brief intervals when his bodily weariness
overpowered him on his melancholy watch, it was observed by those around
him that, even in his short dreaming clumbers, his face remained ever
turned in the same direction, towards the head of the couch, as if drawn
thither by some irresistible attraction, by some powerful ascendancy,
felt even amid the deepest repose of sensation, the heaviest fatigue of
the overlaboured mind, and worn, sinking heart.
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