d, confusedly, and blushed as unrestrainedly in his
turn.

Beholding his embarrassment, Nanna was relieved of her own.

"You will have to trust me, you see," she said, coldly.

The abashed Piers Minor murmured an indistinct assent.

"And you will not forget my message?"

"No, no! He shall have it at the earliest possible moment."

"Very good--it is understood, then. Now you may go."

Piers Minor had not a word to say. He had been meditating upon a
thousand possible explanations, excuses, apologies, and his tongue would
not utter one of them. He accepted his orders meekly, but as he turned
to go he managed to stammer out, "Of course--to meet again."

Nanna, to her own infinite amazement, answered with a look that meant
yes, and knew that he had not failed to so understand it. As she walked
over to the Citadel Square she could feel that he was standing where she
had left him and looking after her. She would have turned to fittingly
rebuke behavior so indecorous, but something told her that her insulted
dignity would be better saved by removing it to a greater distance.

Nanna entered the Citadel Square after some parley with the sentinels on
the walls, who grumbled at the trouble to which they were put to let
down a rope-ladder; but, being a daughter of the Doomsmen, she could not
be denied.

A little crowd of women and elderly men gathered about an ox-cart in the
centre of the square attracted her attention. They were listening to a
speaker who, standing upright in the wagon-body, was haranguing them
earnestly. Nanna recognized him--Prosper, the priest.

It was the old story--repentance, the wrath of the Shining One, and the
imminence of the judgment. The men of the garrison, absorbed in their
preparations for defence, paid no heed; only this handful of old men and
fearful women, who crept a little closer together as they listened and
sought one another's hands. "To-day, to-day, even to-day, and Doom is
fallen, is fallen!"

A disquieting thought flashed into Nanna's mind, the remembrance of
those carefully arranged broken wires in the empty house not more than a
block away from the Citadel Square. Then of those other wires in the
temple of the Shining One, spluttering their wicked-looking sparks. She
strained her ears to catch the humming drone of the engines in the House
of Power, but there was no sound to be heard--they could not be running.

"Yet there will be mischief worked to-night if the priest has h