again to that stern master
who saw them fed as abundantly as his most valued men. These, then,
were those Christians whom he had taken into his protection because of
the Name which had inspired a shepherd boy to save his life.

When he commanded Laodice to go up into the sunlight, he approached
the corner in which the two useless men hid and bade them, too, to go
up into the air.

"Let us have no sickness in this place," he said bluntly and turned on
his heel and left them to obey.

Laodice took one of the older women and timidly climbing the steps
from which the rubbish had been pushed away by the climbing hundreds,
went through the dusk of the passage that terminated in a brilliancy
that dazzled her. And as she walked she heard the footsteps of the two
men behind her.

Up in the chaos of fallen columns, she stood a moment with her hands
pressed over her eyes. Only little by little was she able to permit
the full blaze of the Judean sun to reach them. The uproar on
Jerusalem after the muffled silence of the underground cavern filled
her with terror, and she pressed close to the shelter of the entrance
until the woman at her side reassured her.

"It is nothing," the woman said, with a dreary patience. "It is as it
was yesterday. I come here every day. I know."

After a while Laodice looked about her. The entrance to their refuge
was about the middle of the ruin and therefore a great many paces back
from the streets, so that she did not see Jerusalem's agonies face to
face. But she saw enough to make her cold and to turn her shivering
and panic-stricken into the darkness of the crypt below.

She saw the ascending streets of Zion and the tall fortifications
mounting the heights within the city's limits. There she saw the flash
of swords, swung afar off, spears brandished and the running hither
and thither of defenders on the wall. Below she saw the remote
constricted passages between rows of desolate houses, moving with
people, sounding with clamor. There she saw combats, terrible scenes
of frenzy, deaths and unnamable horrors; starvelings gnawing their
nails; shadows of infants pressed to hollow bosoms; old men too weak
to walk that went on hands and knees; young men and young women in
rags that failed to cover them, and wandering skeletons screaming,
"Woe!"

Meanwhile huge stones mounted over the walls and fell within the city;
three great towers planted beyond the walls, out of range of the
Jewish engines a