ed down upon their knees and began to groan together.
The silver coins on the lamp began to swing; the brass cyanthus which
Amaryllis had recently drained of her last drink of wine moved
gradually to the edge of the pedestal upon which she had placed it.

The dual nature of the uproar was now distinct; organized warfare and
popular disaster at the same time. The Roman was sweeping up the
ancient ravine. Jerusalem had fallen.

The gradual crescendo now attained deafening proportions; the hanging
lamp increased its swing; the silver coins began to strike together
with keen and exquisitely fine music. Juventius the Swan, with his dim
eyes filled with horror, was looking at them. The peculiar desperate
indifference of the wholly hopeless seized him. His long white hands
began to move with the motion of the lamp; the music of the meeting
coins became regular; he caught the note, and mounting, with a bound,
the rostrum that had been his Olympus all his life, began to sing. The
melody of his glorious voice struggled only a moment for supremacy
with the uproar of imminent death and then his increasing exaltation
gave him triumph. The great hall shook with the magnificent power of
his only song!

The Maccabee confronted Amaryllis, with fierce question in his eyes.
She pointed calmly at the heavy white curtain pulled to one side and
caught on a bracket. The brass wicket over the black mouth of the
tunnel was wide.

Without a word, the Maccabee plunged into it and was swallowed up.

Amaryllis looked after him.

"And no farewell?" she said.

The thunder of assault began at her door. Juventius sang it down. The
athlete and the girl crept toward the mouth of the black passage,
wavered a moment and plunged in. After them tumbled a confusion of
artists and servants who were swallowed up, and the hall was filled
only with music.

The woman by the lectern and the singer on the rostrum had chosen. To
live without beauty and to live without love were not possible to the
one who had known beauty all his life, to the one who had learned love
so late--after she had been beggared of her dowry of purity.

There was hardly an appreciable interval between the time of the
desertion of her artists and the thunder of assault at her door, but
in that space there passed before Amaryllis that useless retrospect
which is death's recapitulation of the life it means to take. And out
of that long procession, she singled one conviction which made