r. In that moment he was unmindful of his own torture, in
his dread contemplation of his loved one's shaming and torment. He
shut his eyes that he might not see all that followed.

The brutal soldiery took a fiendish delight in fulfilling the order
given them. They literally rent the clothes off the beautiful girl in
strips and ribbons. Then when she stood absolutely nude before them,
they smeared the beautiful form with the honey.

"Lash her to that pillar," cried Apleon's hellish deputy. He indicated
a pillar, adding: "While they will both get the full benefit of the
sun, they can see each other--lovers are never really happy out of
sight of each other!"

There was a roar of laughter at this thrust.

We cannot--there is no need to detail all their sufferings. In less
than two hours both were crazed with the blistering sun, and the
ravening of the foul and biting insects.

Once, just before the crazing robbed him of coherent thought, the mind
of Wolferstein travelled to the Psalm he knew so well from his
childhood's days, and his black backed lips feebly murmured:

"Be not far from me, O God, for there is none to help me. Many bulls
of Bashan have compassed me. I am poured out like water, my heart is
like wax, it is melted within me. My strength is dried up like a
potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; I am brought into the dust
of death; for dogs have compassed me; the assembly of the wicked have
enclosed me. Be not Thou far from me, O Lord: O my strength, haste
Thou to help me. Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the
power of the dog."

The lovers were alike, both past speech a moment later, and it looked
as though they would soon be past consciousness. Not a single eye,
apparently, in all that vast crowd, had cast a glance of pity upon
them, no voice had been raised in sympathetic pleading for them.
Devilism was the heart of all things, and it changed men and women into
veritable demons. Their persecutors had been as fiends in their
torturing, and the onlookers enjoyed the scene as of some fine sport.

And now it looked as though both were dying. Both were losing
consciousness. The half-closed eyes were blood-shot; the lips were
baked black, and hideously swollen; their mouths were open; and where
the suffused blood--from the fierce knottings of the cords that bound
them--showed blue and purple, the veins were swollen to the bursting
point.

"The block and the axe!" comman