It was indeed too true. The savage cries of the horsemen, the heavy grind of the wagons, all the signs of the advance of the savage horde, with which they had grown so terribly familiar during the siege of Orleans, were around them again, growing louder and louder, nearer and nearer, every hour. And there was absolutely no defence; no walls, no garrison, nothing but a multitude of unwarlike citizens, with the women and children; absolutely no defence but faith and prayer. When the brother and sister returned to Eleazar, they found him far more gentle than usual, and reproaching himself. “Miriam, my wife,” he said, “I have brought you all into this den of lions, and I am no Daniel; and I had no command to come!” As he spoke, a procession of clergy drew near in white robes, and at the head the aged Bishop in full sacerdotal vestments. Slowly they advanced, chanting the psalms of Eleazar’s own people, in Latin, David’s familiar Miserere, “_In the multitude of Thy mercies, blot out my iniquities_.” And the old Jew reverently bent his head, swept away on the tide of prayer. It seemed also as if some individual arrow had pierced his own conscience, for as the captives followed the procession, and he was left alone with his wife, he said to her— “I had no call to come hither; no call to make slaves of these children! Miriam, _what_ is driving me hither and thither through the earth? Surely there _is_ the child; we _shall_ find her; we _will_ ransom her and make her all a child of our house has a right to be. It is for her I am striving and bargaining, and wandering like Cain to and fro through the earth. But is it of the Lord? Or can it be that the Adversary is hunting me hither and thither by his enchantments?” Then, after some hesitation, Miriam ventured to say, in a voice quivering with emotion— “Have you not told me, my beloved, that there is an idol, an enchantment, an enchanter, a thing, a demon, called Mammon?” “It may be,” he replied, with a startled look of horror, as one half-waking from a nightmare. “But however that may be, this Bishop has the look of an Elijah. Let us go in and pray!” Slowly the procession moved on with the Bishop at its head, and closely following him, a young deacon called Nemorius, clasping to his breast the book of the Gospels bound in gold. Numbers of the townspeople were following. Ethne returned to Miriam, but Baithene was swept on in the tide.