eir sport, and first one and then the other
fell once more to prowling over the littered pavements, with the heavy
chains scraping and chinking in their wake. They made no beginning to
feast on the bodies provided for them. That would be for afterwards. In
the present, the fascination of slaughter was big in them, and they
had thought that it would be indulged further. It seemed that they knew
their entertainers.

Again the windlass clanked, and the tethering chains drew the great
beasts clear of the doorway; and again a valve of the farther door swung
ajar, and another prisoner was thrust struggling into the circus. A
sickness seized me when I saw that this was a woman, but still, in view
of the object I had in hand, I made no interruption.

It was not that I had never seen women sent to death before. A general,
who has done his fighting, must in his day have killed women equally
with men; yes, and seen them earn their death-blow by lusty battling.
Yet there seemed something so wanton in this cruel helpless sacrifice
of a woman prisoner, that I had a struggle with myself to avoid
interference. Still it is ever the case that the individual must be
sacrificed to a policy, and so as I say, I watched on, outwardly cold
and impassive.

I watched too (I confess it freely) with a quickening heart. Here was no
sullen submissive victim like the last. She may have been more cowardly
(as some women are), she may have been braver (as many women have shown
themselves); but, at any rate, it was clear that she was going to make a
struggle for her life, and to do vicious damage, it might be, before
she yielded it up. The watchers behind the arrow-slits recognized this.
Their wagers, and the hum of their appreciation, swept loudly round the
ring of the circus.

They stripped their prisoners, before they thrust them out to this
death, of all the clothes they might carry, for clothes have a value;
and so the woman stood there bare-limbed in the moonlight.

She clapped her back to the great stone door by which she had entered,
and faced fate with glowing eye. Gods! there have been times in early
years when I could have plucked out sword and jumped down, and fought
for her there for the sheer delight of such a battle. But now policy
restrained me. The individual might want a helping hand, but it was
becoming more and more clear that Atlantis wanted a minister also; and
before these great needs, the lesser ones perforce must perish. St