signal.

Presently there appeared a number of half-naked men, carrying
short axes stained with blood,--coarse, savage, cruel-looking
brutes all, whose lowering faces bore the marks of a thousand
unrepented crimes,--these were followed by four tall personages
clad in flowing white robes and closely masked,--and finally there
came a band of black slaves clothed in vivid scarlet, dragging
between them two writhing, bleeding creatures,--one a man, the
other a girl in her earliest youth, both convulsed by the evident
last agonies of death.

Arrived at the centre of that part of the vault where the skeleton
crowd was thickest, this horrible cortege halted, while one of the
masked personages undid from his girdle a large bunch of keys. And
now Theos, watching everything with dreadful interest from the
obscure corner where he was, thanks to his unknown friend,
successfully concealed, perceived for the first time a low, iron
door, heavily barred, and surmounted by sharp spikes as long as
drawn daggers. When this dreary portal was, with many a jarring
groan and clang, slowly opened, such an awful cry broke from the
lips of the tortured man as might have wrung compassion from the
most hardened tyrant. Wresting himself fiercely out of the grasp
of the slaves who held him, he struggled to his feet, while the
blood poured from the cruel wounds that were inflicted all over
his body, and raising his manacled hands aloft he cried..

"Mercy! ... mercy! ... not for me, but for her! ... for her, my
love, my life, my tenderest little one! ... What is her crime, ye
fiends? ... why do ye deem love a sin and passion a dishonor? ...