ed down again into that abyss from which
she had been dragged. Her face hardened, her lips tightened, her little
hands clenched in the agony of her thought. "Do it!" she said.

In an instant, with a terrible smile, the messenger of death hurried
from the room. She groaned aloud, and buried herself yet deeper amid the
silken cushions, clutching them frantically with convulsed and twitching
hands.

The eunuch wasted no time, for this deed, once done, he became--save
for some insignificant monk in Asia Minor, whose fate would soon be
sealed--the only sharer of Theodora's secret, and therefore the only
person who could curb and bend that most imperious nature. Hurrying into
the chamber where the visitors were waiting, he gave a sinister signal,
only too well known in those iron days. In an instant the black mutes in
attendance seized the old man and the boy, pushing them swiftly down a
passage and into a meaner portion of the palace, where the heavy smell
of luscious cooking proclaimed the neighbourhood of the kitchens. A side
corridor led to a heavily-barred iron door, and this in turn opened upon
a steep flight of stone steps, feebly illuminated by the glimmer of wall
lamps. At the head and foot stood a mute sentinel like an ebony statue,
and below, along the dusky and forbidding passages from which the cells
opened, a succession of niches in the wall were each occupied by a
similar guardian. The unfortunate visitors were dragged brutally down
a number of stone-flagged and dismal corridors until they descended
another long stair which led so deeply into the earth that the damp
feeling in the heavy air and the drip of water all round showed that
they had come down to the level of the sea. Groans and cries, like those
of sick animals, from the various grated doors which they passed showed
how many there were who spent their whole lives in this humid and
poisonous atmosphere.

At the end of this lowest passage was a door which opened into a single
large vaulted room. It was devoid of furniture, but in the centre was
a large and heavy wooden board clamped with iron. This lay upon a rude
stone parapet, engraved with inscriptions beyond the wit of the eastern
scholars, for this old well dated from a time before the Greeks founded
Byzantium, when men of Chaldea and Phoenicia built with huge unmortared
blocks, far below the level of the town of Constantine. The door was
closed, and the eunuch beckoned to the slaves that they sh