“Unless you will serve our ends. Are you bent on destruction?” “I am in Ahura’s hands. It is His, not yours, to give life or death.” Avil incautiously advanced a few steps into the darkness. “The ‘suicide-demon’ possesses you, Persian,” he was asserting, when with a clatter of chains the prince bounded from his corner and dashed the priest to the bricked floor. “At last, adder!” snorted he, uplifting his manacled hands, and smiting once and again. “Rescue! Help! Murder!” bawled Avil, helpless on his back. Well that the jailers ran swiftly, or Bel would have lacked a pontiff. They plucked the prince from his victim by sheer force, and dragged Avil away, covered with bruises. He stood, invoking upper and nether powers to blast the Persian race forever. They put a shorter chain on the prisoner, but he still challenged out of his gloom. “Closer, friend! Closer! I dearly love a fair wrestle!” But the priest turned away, quaking, and bade the others open the door of the adjacent cell, for he desired speech with that second prisoner of state, the Hebrew Daniel. Darius was left in his dungeon; the bolts clanked into place, the footsteps died away. At first he heard only the swash of the current against the oozing bricks, and the shouts of bargemen forcing their craft up-river. But the prince did not rage in his fetters, as a month earlier, when first they cast him into this “death-in-life.” Laying his ear against the partition, he could hear voices uplifted—Avil-Marduk in angry colloquy with Daniel, who, contrary to Belshazzar’s pledge in the proclamation, had not been kept in light captivity, but in heaviest durance. Darius caught no word, but he guessed that the priest was ill satisfied with his errand when Daniel’s door clashed to suddenly, and Avil’s voice sounded in the gallery:— “Now, as Bel is lord of Babylon, we will find straiter quarters yet for this stiff-backed pair!” Then there were more steps, and again silence; but presently a soft rattle at Darius’s own door, and the prince crept toward it, as far as his chains suffered. Some one spoke at the ample keyhole. “Listen well, my prince, the other wardens are all around us.” Existence in such a prison had taught Darius to catch every whisper. “I hear you. You are Zerubbabel, the Jew. Where is Isaiah?” “He is more suspected than I; and even my fidelity as turnkey is half in doubt. Isaiah is looking to the locks on the tunnel. The escape must be to-night or not at all. Shaphat is arranging to have horses waiting beyond the gates.” Feet sounded once more in the gallery. The speaker moved noiselessly away. Again silence and again the voice:— “The chief priest swears that longer parley with you is useless. He urges the king to cast your head into Cyrus’s camp. That would bar the last door to peace, and spur on Babylon to resist to the uttermost.” “And Daniel?”