Fabricius and Damaris were sitting together in the corridor. After the first rapture of re-union was over, Ethne’s eyes, always quick to perceive any suffering creature, caught sight of the crouching figure of an aged man, propped up against one of the pillars of the house, and of a woman bending over him. In another moment she recognized that the poor, feeble, bent form was that of Eleazar, with his wife beside him. She went to them at once. Miriam looked up into her face with anguish in her eyes; but in Eleazar’s face there was no sign of recognition. On his wrists were the scars and cuts of tightly-strained cords. He looked at Ethne with a piteous appeal, but no comprehension. “All gone!” he kept muttering to himself; “all! all! All the treasure! all the treasure I had heaped up for my Rachel! All the treasure the Almighty had preserved so long for my people, and caused the Gentiles to preserve. The golden table, the golden seven-branched candlestick of the Temple, all are gone! We are forsaken! We are trampled into the dust for ever! There is none to care and none to save!” Fabricius and Marius had but just arrived with the helpless old man. After a time they led him gently away into a chamber apart with his wife, laid him on a couch, set fruit and bread before them, and left them alone. Ethne did not yet venture to tell them of Rachel. She saw that the old man could not bear any fresh shock, even a shock of joy; and besides, she felt she must first see Miriam alone and give her the tidings. When she came back into the corridor, she and Damaris listened to the story of the terrible fortnight of the separation. For fourteen days the luxurious city had been given up to the plunder of the most practised and cruel plunderers in the world; Rome had been abandoned to her bitterest enemies. The palaces, many of them like cities in themselves, each with its amphitheatre, its stadium, its baths, its garrison of slaves, had been rifled of every treasure they contained. Gold, gems, rich silks, costly furniture and raiment, embroideries, tapestries, carpets from every land under the sun; priceless sculptures and paintings, bronzes, marbles, jewelled cups and urns, choice graven work in brass and copper, everything was gone. The temples of the old gods were emptied at last. The statues were taken from all the ancient shrines, and the Temple of Peace was robbed of the sacred plunder found in the Temple of Jerusalem, and sculptured in bas-relief on the Arch of Titus. The pagan statues and the Jewish sacred treasures were placed in two of the Vandal ships, which had different fates. The sacred things of the Jewish temple reached Carthage in safety, but the ship which was laden with the old Roman gods and goddesses foundered and sank, and thus for centuries the beautiful old statues have been lying under the blue waves of the Mediterranean.