“Nay, surely I am neither child nor woman that I should weakly yield to guidance or misleading!  Some trifling matter of free-will remains to me in spite of mine affliction,—­and that I have supped with Sah-luma at the Palace of the High Priestess, has been as much my choice as his example.  Who among men would turn aside from high feasting and mirthful company? ... not I, believe me! ... and Sah-luma’s desires herein were but the reflex of mine own.  We came together through the woodland, and parted but a moment since...”

He stopped abruptly, startled by a sudden clash as of steel and the tramp-tramp of approaching feet.  His aged companion caught him by the arm...

“Hush!” he whispered..  “Not a word more.. not a breath! ... or thy life must pay the penalty!  Quick,—­follow me close! ... step softly! ... there is a hiding-place near at hand where we may couch unseen till these dread visitants pass by.”

Moving stealthily and with anxious precaution, he led the way to a niche hollowed deeply out in the thickness of the wall, and turning his lamp aside so that not the faintest glimmer of it could be perceived, he took Theos by the hand, and drew him into what seemed to be a huge cavernous recess, utterly dark and icy cold.

Here, crouching low in the furthest gloom, they both waited silently,—­Theos ignorant as to the cause of the sudden alarm, and wondering vaguely what strange new circumstance was about to happen.  The measured tramp-tramp of feet came nearer and nearer, and in another moment the flare of smoking torches illumined the vaulted passage, casting many a ruddy flicker and flash on the ivory-gleaming whiteness of the vast skeleton army that stood with such grim and pallid patience as though waiting for a marching signal.

Presently there appeared a number of half-naked men, carrying short axes stained with blood,—­coarse, savage, cruel-looking brutes all, whose lowering faces bore the marks of a thousand unrepented crimes,—­these were followed by four tall personages clad in flowing white robes and closely masked,—­and finally there came a band of black slaves clothed in vivid scarlet, dragging between them two writhing, bleeding creatures,—­one a man, the other a girl in her earliest youth, both convulsed by the evident last agonies of death.

Arrived at the centre of that part of the vault where the skeleton crowd was thickest, this horrible cortege halted, while one of the masked personages undid from his girdle a large bunch of keys.  And now Theos, watching everything with dreadful interest from the obscure corner where he was, thanks to his unknown friend, successfully concealed, perceived for the first time a low, iron door, heavily barred, and surmounted by sharp spikes as long as drawn daggers.  When this dreary portal was, with many a jarring groan and clang, slowly opened, such an awful cry broke from the lips of the tortured man as might have wrung compassion from the most hardened tyrant.  Wresting himself fiercely out of the grasp of the slaves who held him, he struggled to his feet, while the blood poured from the cruel wounds that were inflicted all over his body, and raising his manacled hands aloft he cried..