ion started to their feet in extreme consternation, and the
door was flung open and a host of heathen youths rushed into the nave,
followed by an overwhelming force of Christians from whom they had
sought refuge in the sanctuary. Here they turned at bay to make a last
desperate resistance. Garlands, stripped of their leaves and flowers,
still crowned their heads and hung over their shoulders. They had been
attacked close to the church, by a party of monks when in the act of
driving a gaily-decorated steer to the temple of Apollo, in defiance of
the Imperial edict; and the beast, terrified by the tumult, had rushed
into the narthex for shelter.

The fight in the church was a short one; the idolaters were soon
vanquished; but Eusebius threw himself between them and the monks, and
tried to save the victims from the revengeful fury of the conquerors.
The women had all made for the door, but they did not venture out into
the vestibule, for the young bull was still raging there, trampling or
tossing everything that came in his way. At last, however, a soldier of
the city-watch dealt him a sword-thrust in the neck, and he fell
rolling in his own blood. At once the congregation forced their way out,
shrieking with alarm and excitement, Dada among the number, dragging
the child with her. Papias pulled with all his might to keep her back,
declaring with vehement insistence that he had seen Agne in the church
and wanted to go back to her. Dada, however, neither heard nor heeded;
frightened out of her wits she went on with the crowd, taking him with
her.

She never paused till she reached the house of Medius, quite out of
breath; but then, as the little boy still asserted that he had seen his
sister in the sanctuary, she turned back with him, as soon as the throng
had dispersed. In the church there was no one to hinder them; but they
got no further than the dividing screen, for on the floor beyond lay
the mutilated and bleeding bodies of many a youth who had fallen in the
contest.

How she made her way back to the house of Medius once more she never
knew. For the first time she had been brought face to face with life in
hideous earnest, and when the singer went to look for her in her room,
at dusk, he was startled to find her bright face clouded and her eyes
dim with tears. How bitterly she had been weeping Medius indeed could
not know; he ascribed her altered appearance to fear of the approaching
cataclysm and was happy to be a