While he was thus engaged, while the remains of the gentleness of his childhood were thus awfully revived in the insanity of his age, a musical string wound round a small piece of gilt wood fell from its concealment in her bosom; he snatched it from the ground--it was the fragment of her broken lute, which had never quitted her since the night when, in her innocent grief, she had wept over it in her maiden bed-chamber.
Small, obscure, insignificant as it was, this little token touched the fibre in the Pagan's shattered mind which the all-eloquent form and presence of its hapless mistress had failed to reach; his memory flew back instantly to the garden on the Pincian Mount, and to his past duties in Numerian's household, but spoke not to him of the calamities he had wreaked since that period on his confiding master.

His imagination presented to him at this moment but one image--his servitude in the Christian's abode; and as he now looked on the girl he could regard himself but in one light--as 'the guardian restored'.
'What does she with her music here ?' he whispered apprehensively.
'This is not her father's house, and the garden yonder looks not from the summit of the hill!' As he curiously examined the room, the red spots on the floor suddenly attracted his attention.

A panic, a frantic terror seemed instantly to overwhelm him.

He rose with a cry of horror, and, still holding the girl on his arm, hurried out into the garden trembling and breathless, as if the weapon of an assassin had scared him from the house.
The shock of her rough removal, the sudden influence of the fresh, cold air, restored Antonina to the consciousness of life at the moment when Ulpius, unable to support her longer, laid her against the little heap of turf which marked the position of the young chieftain's grave.

Her eyes opened wildly; their first glance fixed upon the shattered door and the empty room.