ho looked like wild beasts. Vinicius as
he walked by the side of Cyrus looked into faces, searched, inquired, at
times stumbled against bodies of people who had fainted from the crowd,
the stifling air, the heat, and pushed farther into the dark depth of
the room, which seemed to be as spacious as a whole amphitheatre.

But he stopped on a sudden, for he seemed to hear near the grating
a voice known to him. He listened for a while, turned, and, pushing
through the crowd, went near. Light fell on the face of the speaker,
and Vinicius recognized under the skin of a wolf the emaciated and
implacable countenance of Crispus.

"Mourn for your sins!" exclaimed Crispus, "for the moment is near. But
whoso thinks by death itself to redeem his sins commits a fresh sin, and
will be hurled into endless fire. With every sin committed in life ye
have renewed the Lord's suffering; how dare ye think that that life
which awaits you will redeem this one? To-day the just and the sinner
will die the same death; but the Lord will find His own. Woe to you, the
claws of the lions will rend your bodies; but not your sins, nor your
reckoning with God. The Lord showed mercy sufficient when He let Himself
be nailed to the cross; but thenceforth He will be only the judge,
who will leave no fault unpunished. Whoso among you has thought to
extinguish his sins by suffering, has blasphemed against God's justice,
and will sink all the deeper. Mercy is at an end, and the hour of God's
wrath has come. Soon ye will stand before the awful Judge in whose
presence the good will hardly be justified. Bewail your sins, for the
jaws of hell are open; woe to you, husbands and wives; woe to you,
parents and children."

And stretching forth his bony hands, he shook them above the bent heads;
he was unterrified and implacable even in the presence of death, to
which in a while all those doomed people were to go. After his words,
were heard voices: "We bewail our sins!" Then came silence, and only the
cry of children was audible, and the beating of hands against breasts.

The blood of Vinicius stiffened in his veins. He, who had placed all his
hope in the mercy of Christ, heard now that the day of wrath had come,
and that even death in the arena would not obtain mercy. Through his
head shot, it is true, the thought, clear and swift as lightning, that
Peter would have spoken otherwise to those about to die. Still those
terrible words of Crispus filled with fanaticism