all she had gone through during the last few hours, and the catastrophes
that had befallen her grandmother and her father. She had exchanged but
few words with the physician, who was still unceasingly busy in trying to
restore his patient to consciousness, and who had assured her that he had
every hope of her father's recovery.

But at length the girl looked up with an eager gaze and said, sadly
enough: "You said something about an antidote to poison, Apuleius? Then
my father tried to escape the final destruction by attempting to kill
himself.--Is it so?"

The leech looked at her keenly, and after confirming her suspicion and
explaining to her exactly how the fateful deed had been accomplished, he
went on:

"The storm had completely unnerved him--it unmanned us all--and yet that
was only the prelude to the tremendous doom which is hanging over the
universe. It is at hand; we can hear its approach; the stones are
yielding! the Christian's engines are opening the way for it to enter!"

Apuleius spoke in a tone of sinister foreboding, and the falling stones
dislodged by the battering-ram thundered a solemn accompaniment to his
prophecy. Gorgo, turned pale; but it was not the physician's ominous
speech that alarmed her, but the quaking of the walls of the room.
Still, the Serapeum was built for eternity; the ram might bring down a
wall, but it could not destroy or even shake the building itself.

Outside, the hubbub of fighting men grew louder and louder every minute,
and Apuleius, increasingly anxious, went to the door to listen. Gorgo
could see that his hands trembled! he--a man--was frightened, while she