ust you. Not merely like you, you understand. It was you--you
yourself. I saw the same soul in your frightened eyes. You looked white
and bonnie and wonderful in the firelight. I had just one thought in my
head--to get you awa' with me; to keep you all to mysel' in my own home
somewhere beyond the hills. You clawed at my face with your nails. I
heaved you over my shoulder, and I tried to find a way oot of the light
of the burning hoose and back into the darkness.

"Then came the thing that I mind best of all. You're ill, Maggie. Shall
I stop? My God! you have the very look on your face that you had last
night in my dream. You screamed. He came runnin' in the firelight. His
head was bare; his hair was black and curled; he had a naked sword in
his hand, short and broad, little more than a dagger. He stabbed at me,
but he tripped and fell. I held you with one hand, and with the
other----"

His wife had sprung to her feet with writhing features.

"Marcus!" she cried. "My beautiful Marcus! Oh, you brute! you brute! you
brute!" There was a clatter of tea-cups as she fell forward senseless
upon the table.

* * * * *

They never talk about that strange isolated incident in their married
life. For an instant the curtain of the past had swung aside, and some
strange glimpse of a forgotten life had come to them. But it closed
down, never to open again. They live their narrow round--he in his shop,
she in her household--and yet new and wider horizons have vaguely formed
themselves around them since that summer evening by the crumbling Roman
fort.

IV

THE COMING OF THE HUNS

In the middle of the fourth century the state of the Christian religion
was a scandal and a disgrace. Patient, humble, and long-suffering in
adversity, it had become positive, aggressive, and unreasonable with
success. Paganism was not yet dead, but it was rapidly sinking, finding
its most faithful supporters among the conservative aristocrats of the
best families on the one hand, and among those benighted villagers on
the other who gave their name to the expiring creed. Between these two
extremes the great majority of reasonable men had turned from the
conception of many gods to that of one, and had rejected for ever the
beliefs of their forefathers. But with the vices of polytheism, they had
also abandoned its virtues, among which toleration and religious good
humour had been conspicuous. The strenuous earnestn