Antonina was kneeling with her face turned from the door, as the assassin seized her by her long hair and drove the knife into her neck.

The moaning accents of the girl, bewailing her approaching fate, closed in one faint groan; she stretched out her arms, and fell forward over her father's body.
In the ferocious triumph of the moment, Goisvintha raised her arm to repeat the stroke; but at that instant the madman looked round.

'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.