“Would I be here for a fancy?” she whispered.  “Believe what I say:  after this there shall be no Judenhetze.”

The courtyard was a large one, penned between a couple of houses, and separated from the street by the wall which the great gate pierced.  From it half a dozen doors led into the houses, each a possible road of escape when the hour should come.  Truda looked about her calmly.

The people were standing about in large groups—­men, women, and children—­and they spoke in whispers among themselves.  But all of them were listening; each sound from without stiffened them to scared attention.  From somewhere distant there traveled a dull noise of shouts and singing, a confused blatancy of far voices; and as it swelled and sank and swelled again, a tremor ran over that silent waiting throng like a wind-ripple on standing crops.  Overhead the sky shone with pin-point stars; a breath of air stirred about them faintly; all seemed keyed to that tense furtive quiet of the doomed Jews.  Not a child cried, not a woman sobbed; they had learned, direfully enough, the piteous art of the oppressed—­the knack of silence and concealment.

It was by slow degrees that the distant shoutings came nearer; the mob had yet to unite in purpose and ferocity.  Truda, listening, and marking its approach, could almost tell by the violence of its noise how it wound through the streets, staggering drunkenly, waving bludgeons, working itself to the necessary point of brutal fury.  And always it grew nearer.  Its note changed and deepened, till it sank to a long snarling drone; she, wise in the moods of men in the mass, a practicer on the minds of multitudes, knew the moment was at hand; this was the voice of human beings with the passions of beasts.  The noise dwindled as the mob poured through an alley, and then broke out again, loud and daunting, as it emerged.  It was near at hand; now there was added to its voice the drum of its footsteps on cobble-paved streets, and suddenly, brief and agonizing, a wild outcry of shrieks as some wretched creature was found out of hiding and the bludgeons beat it out of human semblance.  All round Truda there was a stir among the Jews; a child wrought beyond endurance whimpered and was gagged under an apron; the howl of the mob startled her ears as it poured along the street outside the great gate.

Then came confusion, a chaos of voices, of ringing blows upon the gate, screams and moans, the shrill sound of the glee that goes with open murder, and a sudden light that shot up against the sky from a house on fire.  The crowd of Jews in the courtyard thinned as some slipped swiftly into the dark doorways to be ready for flight, startled by a tattoo of blows on the gate that broke out abruptly.  Truda stood fast where she was, listening with a kind of detachment.  The blows on the gate increased; she could even hear, among the other sounds, the heavy breathing of those who strove to break a way in.  Men came running