"Who can abide the displeasure of the Shining One? Who can stand before the flame of his wrath? A mighty and a terrible god, yet he would have left his servant to starve before his altar--you have seen that for yourselves. It is ten days now since even a woman has condescended to kneel at his shrine and make her offerings of meat and drink. I, his high-priest, may eat no common food, but how should the lord of heaven and earth keep such trivial circumstances in mind? He had forgotten, and so I must have died but for your opportune coming and pious gifts. "One might argue that our lord employed you as the instruments of my deliverance," continued the priest, musingly. "I might think it, but that I know the Shining One of old. It is his pleasure to punish, not to help; to slay and not to make alive. Never has he given aught of grace to me who have served him faithfully for these threescore years. And to-day, if I should sit with him upon the death-chair, he would consume me as utterly as though I were the foulest-mouthed blasphemer in all Doom. What think ye, in all honesty, of the Shining One? Is he a god to be propitiated by sacrifice and offering, to be worshipped and adored--supreme, almighty, everlasting? Or are we but blind fools, trembling before a blind force that knows and sees and is nothing, except as we, its lords and masters, may compel it to work our will?" The muttering of thunder broke in upon the priest's last words. A storm-cloud was driving in from the west, low-hanging and menacing. The priest's face changed. "He comes! he comes!" he continued, with fanatic intensity. "This is our lord, in very truth, who now stands before us, calling upon his people to turn to him ere it be too late. Yet three days, and Doom, Doom the Mighty, is fallen, is fallen! He has said it--yet three days." The two women stayed neither to see nor to listen further. Hand-in-hand they gained the street and ran in the direction of the Citadel Square, heedless of the rain that was now beginning to fall. Several blocks away they paused, exhausted, compelled to seek shelter in a doorway from the fury of the storm. Some one was already there--a man. He turned as they entered, and Esmay saw that it was Ulick. For several moments they stood side by side without exchanging a word, and, indeed, no speech would have been audible amid the almost continuous crashing of the thunder-peals. Then, as the first violence of the storm expended itself, Esmay heard her name uttered, and realized that Ulick was holding her hand in both his own. "Don't!" she pleaded, and drew her hand away. Ulick's face hardened. "I might have known it," he said, bitterly. "Yet he who has been false to friendship may betray love as well." "He is dead," she said, and Ulick started. "Constans--dead!" he stammered. "Hanged at the yard-arm of the _Black Swan_. But Quinton Edge still lives." "You loved him?" persisted Ulick, the sense of his injury still strong within him.