by--a quarter of an hour--and no one had come at its call. The old
captain's impatience turned to surprise, his surprise became wrath. The
messengers he sent down did not return and the great moving shed of the
Romans was brought nearer and nearer to the southern side of the temple,
screening the miners from the rare missiles which the few men remaining
with him cast clown by his orders.

The enemy were evidently making a suitable foundation on which to place
the storming engine--a beam with a ram's head of iron-to make a breach in
the temple-wall. Every minute's delay on the part of the besieged was an
advantage to the enemy. A hundred-two hundred more hands on the roof,
and their tactics might yet be defeated.

Tears of rage, of the bitter sense of impotence, started to the old
soldier's eyes; and when, at length, one of his messengers came back and
told him that the men and women alike seemed quite demented, and all and
each refused to come up on the roof, he uttered a wrathful curse and
rushed down-stairs himself.

He stormed in on the trembling wretches; and when he beheld with his own
eyes all that his volunteers had done dining that fateful night, he raved
and thundered; asked them, rather confusedly perhaps, if they knew what
it was to be expected to command and find no obedience; scolded the
refractory, driving some on in front of him; and then, as he perceived
that some of them were making off with the girls through the door leading
to the secret passage, he placed himself on guard with his sword drawn,
and threatened to cut down any who attempted to escape.

In the midst of all this Olympius and his party had come into the ball
and seeing the commander struggling, sword in hand, with the recalcitrant