behind the arrow-slit with a still face. And presently another
scene in this ghastly play was enacted.

The cave-tigers tired of their sport, and first one and then
the other fell once more to prowling over the littered pavements,
with the heavy chains scraping and chinking in their wake. They
made no beginning to feast on the bodies provided for them. That
would be for afterwards. In the present, the fascination of
slaughter was big in them, and they had thought that it would be
indulged further. It seemed that they knew their entertainers.

Again the windlass clanked, and the tethering chains drew the
great beasts clear of the doorway; and again a valve of the farther
door swung ajar, and another prisoner was thrust struggling into
the circus. A sickness seized me when I saw that this was a woman,
but still, in view of the object I had in hand, I made no
interruption.

It was not that I had never seen women sent to death before.
A general, who has done his fighting, must in his day have killed
women equally with men; yes, and seen them earn their death-blow by
lusty battling. Yet there seemed something so wanton in this cruel
helpless sacrifice of a woman prisoner, that I had a struggle with
myself to avoid interference. Still it is ever the case that the
individual must be sacrificed to a policy, and so as I say, I
watched on, outwardly cold and impassive.

I watched too (I confess it freely) with a quickening heart.
Here was no sullen submissive victim like the last. She may have
been more cowardly (as some women are), she may have been braver