rang
forward to prevent further cruelty, but the slave paid no further heed
to the prostrate man. Catching Perpetua by the hands, they hurried her
at full speed down the mountain-path to the place where a litter was
waiting.

Robert lay alone on the summit of the hill, dizzy with pain and rage,
beating the earth with his clinched fists and moaning to himself: "I am
the King! I am the King! I am the King!"

VIII

PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN

A little way from the city Lycabetta had found, dedicated to our Lady of
Delights, a fitting shelter for herself and for her attendant nymphs.
This was the palace of a dead and heirless duke, somewhile abandoned and
now renewed with life and color by the gold of the Neapolitan. It stood
apart in spacious gardens that were girdled so thickly with groves of
cypresses that none save the initiated could dream of the wonders masked
by the melancholy trees. But those initiated knew well that behind the
solemn barrier there smiled a kind of earthly paradise--pleasances where
even the flowerful soil of Sicily seemed extravagantly prolific of
color, extravagantly prodigal of odors; thickets wherein the great god
Pan might have delighted to lurk; fair colonnades thick-carpeted with
the petals of roses and framed to greet all cool, benevolent breezes;
temples to exquisite divinities; fountains lapsing, murmurous as the
laughter of youth, into great basins whose smooth waters welcomed smooth
bodies; grottoes deep and mysterious, affording shelter in the fiercest
heats. To these enchanted privacies the young and rich who had followed
Robert from Naples and had welcomed his coming to Sicily made
pilgrimage, and day and night pleasure held there her pagan court as if
the wild cry had never been heard by Thamus, the pilot, calling from the
islands of Paxae and heralding the coming of the white Christ.

On this night the House of Pleasure was unusually quiet. Those who
guarded the golden gates denied admission to all who could not conjure
with the King's name, and Lycabetta was alone with her favorite women,
fair, Greek-faced girls with fair, Greek names--Glycerium, Hypsipyle,
Euphrosyne, Lysidice. The room that shrined her beauty was a marvellous
medley of the styles of many architectures, of the arts of many lands,
as if the streams of wealth and splendor flowing from all the sources of
the world had carried thither its rarest treasures. Greece, Rome,
Byzantium, the genius of the Saracen, and