The sudden tempest of acclamation, the swift fluttering of innumerable garments in the air, startled the horses.  They dashed violently forward, and plunged upon the bits.  The left rein broke.  They swerved to the right, swinging the chariot sideways with a grating noise, and dashing it against the stone parapet of the arena.  In an instant the wheel was shattered.  The axle struck the ground, and the chariot was dragged onward, rocking and staggering.

By a strenuous effort Hermas kept his place on the frail platform, clinging to the unbroken rein.  But the boy was tossed lightly from his side at the first shock.  His head struck the wall.  And when Hermas turned to look for him, he was lying like a broken flower on the sand.

VI

GREAT FEAR AND RECOVERED JOY

They carried the boy in a litter to the House of the Golden Pillars, summoning the most skilful physician of Antioch to attend him.  For hours the child was as quiet as death.  Hermas watched the white eyelids, folded close like lily-buds at night, even as one watches for the morning.  At last they opened; but the fire of fever was burning in the eyes, and the lips were moving in a wild delirium.

Hour after hour that sweet childish voice rang through the halls and chambers of the splendid, helpless house, now rising in shrill calls of distress and senseless laughter, now sinking in weariness and dull moaning.  The stars waxed and waned; the sun rose and set; the roses bloomed and fell in the garden, the birds sang and slept among the jasmine-bowers.  But in the heart of Hermas there was no song, no bloom, no light—­only speechless anguish, and a certain fearful looking-for of desolation.

He was like a man in a nightmare.  He saw the shapeless terror that was moving toward him, but he was impotent to stay or to escape it.  He had done all that he could.  There was nothing left but to wait.

He paced to and fro, now hurrying to the boy’s bed as if he could not bear to be away from it, now turning back as if he could not endure to be near it.  The people of the house, even Athenais, feared to speak to him, there was something so vacant and desperate in his face.

At nightfall, on the second of those eternal days, he shut himself in the library.  The unfilled lamp had gone out, leaving a trail of smoke in the air.  The sprigs of mignonette and rosemary, with which the room was sprinkled every day, were unrenewed, and scented the gloom with a close odor of decay.  A costly manuscript of Theocritus was tumbled in disorder on the floor.  Hermas sank into a chair like a man in whom the very spring of being is broken.  Through the darkness some one drew near.  He did not even lift his head.  A hand touched him; a soft arm was laid over his shoulders.  It was Athenais, kneeling beside him and speaking very low: