scattered the proud in the
imagination of their hearts."

The words, as he rendered them, rang in his ears like a warning. He
hardened his heart, but he listened still, for the next sentence seemed
to lapse with deeper solemnity through the golden air.

"Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles."

Robert echoed the words in a scream of insane fury.

"He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low
degree."

In the quiet of the evening his voice sounded strange to him, horridly
shouting; he shook his clinched fists at the church as he raved.

"These fools shall bray no more folly. Who shall uplift or cast down
here save I? Is there any other God save I in Sicily?"

To him, in his heat, it seemed as if the church, through the voices of
her ministrants, was seeking to come between him and his purpose, to
save Perpetua from his hate. Though the voices had ceased, the august
menace echoed in his brain, and he raved again.

"Shall I, who am the glory of the world, the very flower of knighthood,
believe that any power beyond those skies can cast me from my seat or
save this woman from my will?"

Even as he spoke the golden sunlight withered around him; the blackness
of darkness seemed to muffle all the earth; only a pale light like the
light of earliest dawn illuminated the gray walls of the church and
gleamed with strange effulgence upon the armored image of the archangel.
The King, rigid with terror, beheld the image of the archangel move
slowly into life. It lifted the drawn sword on which its hands had
rested and pointed the weapon at the crouching King. Slowly the radiant
figure seemed to leave its niche; stately it descended the rough-hewn
steps. Then it paused. The church now was swallowed up in the enveloping
darkness. Only the figure of the archangel was visible in that agony of
blackness, bright as burnished silver, bright as moonlight. Its right
arm extended its sword towards the crouching King, and the blade glowed
like a blade of white fire. Like a flash of lightning it seemed to leap
to Robert's breast and sear his heart; he would have screamed with the
pain, but his voice seemed dead within him, and all around him thunder
rolled, horrible as the noise of a dispersing world.

The awful tumult was followed by a yet more awful silence. Robert,
unable to move, unable to speak, feeling as if he were the last living
thing on an obliterated earth, unable to do aught save stare in