The cowed populace answered never a word, but the Zealots and swordsmen swarmed to the broad tops of the walls with hoots of derision. Stones rained down on the emissary for peace. They hissed his words with shameless insults, and bade the Romans not draw back in cowardice because this was Jewish Sabbath, but to come on and dare to try the third strong wall. When the peace emissary would have shouted again, those on the wall threw a naked dead body in his face. The wild warrior blood of her Herod Arab ancestors surged through Bernice’s veins. She knew then the urge that had driven her through the Aqueduct. She could have leaped from the walls to join the Romans down there fighting in carnival of blood had she been man. Why had she been born woman—the tool—instead of man, the hand that wielded the tool? She knew she was a rebel against Fate; but had not Herod the Great been rebel, too, till he mastered Fate and made himself King? She tore her purple girdle from her waist and waved it at the conquerors from the turret window. The Roman trumpets faded in fainter echo. The marchers and counter marchers encircled the city in a ring of swords. Bernice from the Tower saw that the hired Macedonian mercenaries had been thrust forward first. She knew what that meant—these were the swordsmen of the world paid in plunder—there would be no mercy. Those not slain would be sold as slaves, the men for the mines, the women—for what? Was this the Kingdom for which she grasped? A silence fell for a moment on the terrific confused clamor within the city. A melancholy wail of woe came up from the central valley between Temple and Palace, and some madman’s maniacal scream resounded from the parapets to the Tower—“Woe—woe—woe is Jerusalem! How is that great Babylon drunk with the blood of the prophets fallen! Jerusalem shall fall this day! There shall not be left one stone upon another.” “Were not those the very words of our Lord, when you admired the beauty of the Temple?” asked Mark. “Peter bade me to put that in his Gospel of our Lord’s life.” “So every disciple has related to me, and so I have written in His Life, for the Greek churches of Asia,” answered the physician, Luke. “And we thought he had come to set up earthly kingdom in this Temple,” said the venerable Matthew. “And now we know it is a Kingdom not made with hands for which all Time has prepared, and this earthly kingdom shall vanish quite away for a New Heaven, and a New Earth. This is the passing of the Old. These are the birth pangs to the New. Let us read what the scrolls of the prophets have said.”