The tears stood in her eyes, but she neither sighed nor spoke.

Her frame trembled all over with the excess of her astonishment and delight, as she still steadfastly looked on him and still listened intently as he proceeded:-- 'Fear, then, no longer for your safety--Goisvintha, whom you dread, is far from us; she knows not that we are here; she cannot track our footsteps now, to threaten or to harm you! Remember no more how you have suffered and I have sinned! Think only how bitterly I have repented our morning's separation, and how gladly I welcome our meeting of to-night! Oh, Antonina! you are beautiful with a wondrous loveliness, you are young with a perfected and unchildlike youth, your words fall upon my ear with the music of a song of the olden time; it is like a dream of the spirits that my fathers worshipped, when I look up and behold you at my side!' An expression of mingled confusion, pleasure, and surprise, flushed the girl's half-averted countenance as she listened to the Goth.

She rose with a smile of ineffable gratitude and delight, and pointed to the prospect beyond, as she softly rejoined:-- 'Let us go a little further onward, where the moonlight shines over the meadow below.

My heart is bursting in this shadowy place! Let us seek the light that is yonder; it seems happy like me!' They walked forward; and as they went, she told him again of the sorrows of her past day; of her lonely and despairing progress from his tent to the solitary house where he had found her in the night, and where she had resigned herself from the first to meet a death that had little horror for her then.

There was no thought of reproach, no utterance of complaint, in this renewal of her melancholy narration.
It was solely that she might luxuriate afresh in those delighting expressions of repentance and devotion, which she knew that it would call forth from the lips of Hermanric, that she now thought of addressing him once more with the tale of her grief.
As they still went onward; as she listened to the rude fervent eloquence of the language of the Goth; as she looked on the deep repose of the landscape, and the soft transparency of the night sky; her mind, ever elastic under the shock of the most violent emotions, ever ready to regain its wonted healthfulness and hope--now recovered its old tone, and re-assumed its accustomed balance.