allegiance. For this is the way with these common people; they
will work up an enthusiasm one minute, and an hour later it will
have fled away and left them cold and empty.

But Zaemon made no further calls upon their loyalty. He
finished the prescribed form of sentences, and stepped down off the
platform of the war engine with the Symbol of our Lord the Sun
thrust out resolutely before him. To all ordinary seeming the
crowd had been packed so that no further compression was possible,
but before the advance of the Symbol the people crushed back,
leaving a wide lane for his passage.

And here came the turning point of my life. At first, like,
I take it, every one else in that crowd, I imagined that the old
man, having finished his mission, was making a way to return to the
place from which he had come. But he held steadily to one
direction, and as that was towards myself, it naturally came to my
mind that, having dealt with greater things, he would now settle
with the less; or, in plainer words, that having put his policy
before the swarming people, he would now smite down the man he had
seen but yesterday seated as Phorenice's minister. Well, I should
lose that final fight I had promised myself, and that mound of
slain for my funeral bed. It was clear that Zaemon was the
mouthpiece of the Priests' Clan, duly appointed; and I also was a
priest. If the word had been given on the Sacred Mountain to those
who sat before the Ark of the Mysteries that Atlantis would prosper
more with Deucalion sent to the Gods, I was ready to bow to the
sentence with submissiveness. That I had regret for this mode of
cutting off, I will not deny. No man who has practised the game of
arms could abandon the promise of such a gorgeous final battle