llision took
place: on one side the handsome youths, crowned with garlands, with their
noble Greek type of heads, thoughtful brows, perfumed curls, and anointed
limbs exercised in the gymnasium--on the other the sinister fanatics in
sheep-skin, ascetic visionaries grown grey in fasting, scourging, and
self-denial.

The monks now prepared to meet the onset of the young enthusiasts who
were fighting for freedom of thought and enquiry, for Art and Beauty.
Each side was defending what it felt to be the highest Good, each was
equally in earnest as to its convictions, both fought for something
dearer and more precious than this earthly span of existence. But the
philosophers' party had swords; the monks' sole weapon was the scourge,
and they were accustomed to ply that, not on each other but on their own
rebellious flesh. A wild and disorderly struggle began with swingeing
blows on both sides; prayers and psalms mingling with the battle-song of
the heathen. Here a monk fell wounded, there one lay dead, there again
lay a fine and delicate-looking youth, felled by the heavy fist of a
recluse. A hermit wrestled hand to hand with a young philosopher who,
only yesterday had delivered his first lecture on the Neo-Platonism of
Plotinus to an interested audience.

And in the midst of this mad struggle stood Agne with her little brother,
who clung closely to her skirts and was too terrified to shed a tear or
utter a cry. The girl was resolutely calm, but she was too utterly
terror-stricken even to pray. Fear, absorbing fear had stunned her
thoughts; it overmastered her like some acute physical pain which began
in her heart and penetrated every fibre of her frame.

Even while the Imperial message was being read she had been too
frightened to take it all in; and now she simply shut her eyes tight and
hardly understood what was going on around her, till a new and different
noise sounded close in her ears: the clatter of hoofs, blare of trumpets
and shouts and screams. At last the tumult died away and, when she
ventured to open her eyes and look about her, the place all round her was
as clear as though it had been swept by invisible hands; here and there
lay a dead body and there still was a dense crowd in the street leading
to the Caesareum, but even that was dispersing and retreating before the
advance of a mounted force.

She breathed freely once more, and released the child's head from the
skirt of her dress in which he had wrappe