silver bar.

But the room was lighted suddenly by a ruddy glare which leaped into it
from without; a gust of voices swept beneath the window like the rising
of a wind; there came the sound of many feet, as though a crowd had
gathered before the house; cries, and the rattle of weapons. Again
Eldris ran to the window. She cried over her shoulder in a frightened
voice:

"Oh, blessed Peter! there be armed men entering all the houses in the
lane! Haste thee, Sosia--let them not find thee naked here. I will go
down and see--"

Below, the voice of Juncina cried:

"We harbor no fugitive here, I tell thee! Here be none but I and my two
maids!"

Eldris, climbing down the ladder with hasty feet, saw that the room,
fogged with gray smoke, was filled with half a score of men; saw Juncina
struggling in a corner, held by two; saw others overturning the scanty
furniture, slashing with their swords at fish-nets and bedding,
thrusting their torches into every nook and corner. She would have
stumbled up the ladder again out of their sight, but a shout told her
that she was seen. A great fellow seized her, dragging her from the
ladder; in his grasp she fluttered like a rag caught in a briar. Another
pulled her from him; she was in the midst of mail-clad forms that
towered over her, drink-flushed faces, brutal with greed, that leered
down upon her, hairy hands that grasped at her. Her captor she eluded,
and another, her breath coming in dry sobs of terror; at her desperate
doublings, like a frightened hare, their shouts of laughter told that
the sport was very well to their liking. The doorway, close at hand,
broken open and unguarded, offered a chance. She darted through it into
the night, into another world of terror, in which sinister sounds met
her on every side.

In a blind panic of fright she ran, thinking at every step to feel a
heavy hand upon her; in the narrow lane she ran, jostled by those who
fled beside her. Flames from burning houses threw their glare over
fights which occurred in every street and lane, in which wounded men and
dying crawled from beneath the feet of combatants into the shelter of
black doorways. A band of horsemen galloped up the lane, overriding
those who crossed their path, with shouts of "Death to Britons!"

Eldris saw them coming; saw the mouth of an alley black on one side, a
slit between houses scarce wide enough for a horseman to ride through.
She dived into it, stumbling now and again into th