ently threatening him and his comrades.

In these brave souls a struggle was going on, between their sense of
discipline and devotion to their fine young leader, and their awe of the
god; it was visible in their puzzled faces, in their hands raised in
supplication. Constantine, however, relentlessly repeated his order; and,
when they still refused to obey, he turned his back on their ranks with a
gesture of bitter contempt, and shouted his commands to the infantry
posted by the colonnade behind which Gorgo was watching all these
proceedings.

But these also were refractory. The heathen were triumphant, and
encouraged the soldiers with loud cries to persist.

Constantine turned once more to his own men, and finding them obstinate
in their disobedience, he went forward himself to where the ladders were
standing, moved one of them from the wall and leaned it up against the
body of the statue, seized the axe that lay nearest, and mounted from
rung to rung. The murmurs of the heathen were suddenly silenced; the
multitude were so still that the least sound of one plate of armor
against another was audible, that each man could hear his neighbor
breathe, and that Gorgo fancied she could hear her own heart throb.

The man and the god stood face to face, and the man who was about to lay
hands on the god was her lover. She watched his movements with breathless
interest; she longed to call out to him, to follow him as he mounted the
ladder, to fall on his neck and keep him from committing such
sacrilege--not out of fear of the ruin he might bring upon the world, but
only because she felt that the first blow he should deal to this
beautiful and unique work of art might wreck her love for him, as his axe
would wreck the ivory. She was not afraid for him; he seemed to her
inviolable and invulnerable; but her whole soul shuddered at the deed
which he was steeling himself to perpetrate. She remembered their happy
childhood together, his own artistic attempts, the admiration with which
he had gazed at the great works of the ancient sculptors--and it seemed
impossible that he, of all men he, should lay hands on that masterpiece,
that he, of all men, should be the one to insult, mutilate and ruin it.
It was not--could not be true!

But there he was, at the top of the ladder; he passed the axe from his
left hand to his right, and leaning back a little, looked at the head of
the god from one side. She could see his face plainly, and note