n 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 wrapped and buried it. The end of her
alarms was not yet come, however, for a troop of the young heathen came
flying across the square in wild retreat before a division of the heavy
cavalry, which had intervened to part the combatants.

The fugitives came straight towards her; again she closed her eyes
tightly, expecting every instant to find herself under the horses' feet.
Then one of the runaways knocked down Papias, and she could bear no
more; her senses deserted her, her knees failed under her, she lost
consciousness, and with a dull groan she fell on the dusty pavement.
Close to her, as she lay, rushed the pursued and the pursuers--and at
last, how long after she knew not, when she recovered her senses she
felt as if she were floating in the air, and presently perceived that a
soldier had her in his arms and was carrying her like a child.

Fresh alarms and fresh shame overwhe