were the eyes which glared upon him from
those sunken sockets, that his sight was dazzled. The axe turned aside,
and struck her shoulder. She reeled, but did not fall.

'It is enough,' she said quietly.

'The accursed Grendel's daughter numbed my arm!' said Smid. 'Let her go!
No man shall say that I struck a woman twice.'

'Nidhogg waits for her, soon or late,' answered Wulf.

And Miriam, coolly folding her shawl around her, turned and walked
steadily down the stair; while all men breathed more freely, as if
delivered from some accursed and supernatural spell.

'And now,' said Wulf, 'to your posts, and vengeance!'

The mob had weltered and howled ineffectually around the house for some
half-hour. But the lofty walls, opening on the street only by a few
narrow windows in the higher stories, rendered it an impregnable
fortress. Suddenly, the iron gates were drawn back, disclosing to
the front rank the court, glaring empty and silent and ghastly in the
moonlight. For an instant they recoiled, with a vague horror, and dread
of treachery: but the mass behind pressed them onward, and in swept
the murderers of Hypatia, till the court was full of choking wretches,
surging against the walls and pillars in aimless fury. And then, from
under the archway on each side, rushed a body of tall armed men, driving
back all incomers more; the gates slid together again upon their grooves
and the wild beasts of Alexandria were trapped at last.

And then began a murder grim and great. From three different doors
issued a line of Goths, whose helmets and mail-shirts made them
invulnerable to the clumsy weapons of the mob, and began hewing their
way right through the living mass, helpless from their close-packed
array. True, they were but as one to ten; but what are ten curs before
one lion?.... And the moon rose higher and higher, staring down ghastly
and unmoved upon that doomed court of the furies, and still the bills
and swords hewed on and on, and the Goths drew the corpses, as they
found room, towards a dark pile in the midst, where old Wulf sat upon
a heap of slain, singing the praises of the Amal and the glories of
Valhalla, while the shrieks of his lute rose shrill above the shrieks of
the flying and the wounded, and its wild waltz-time danced and rollicked
on swifter and swifter as the old singer maddened, in awful mockery of
the terror and agony around.

And so, by men and purposes which recked not of her, as is the wont of