The other consented, still reluctantly, and Nicholas looked through the house from roof to cellar, but found her not. And "Ah, poor lad," he thought, "but this will be bitter news, for if she has gone into the streets, God save her!" It was now one hour past noon, and in the hot, breathless air already the thick sour smell of blood hung about the street. The square was a shambles, neither more nor less, and the dead lay about in heaps. With the peasants from the country had come in hungry, half-wild dogs, and as Nicholas passed the square again, now deserted by the besiegers for the great mass of the town which lay higher up the slope towards the citadel, two or three of these slunk away with red dripping mouths from their horrible banqueting; but one, hungrier or bolder than the others, stood there over the body of a child snarling at him. The sight sickened him, and he shot the animal through the head. Black patches of flies swarmed in hundreds over the congealed pools of blood, and rose with an unclean whir and buzz as he approached. The heat was stifling, and from the tower where he had planted it but four hours ago the flag hung in folds round its staff. The deadly taint of death was in the air, with the foul odors of flesh already putrefying. Nicholas felt suddenly faint and weary, but seeing a stream of water running down one of the gutters in the square all red and turbid, he followed it up and found where it sprang from--a leaden pipe out of a lion's mouth in one of the side streets. He drank deeply of it, and bathed his face and hands there, and feeling refreshed followed on towards where he knew the Mainats would be. Mixed with the dead were not a few Greeks, and as he passed up the street he saw with a sudden pang of horror three or four bodies, apparently lifeless, stir, and from below there came out the hand of a living man, striving to get hold of something by which he could pull himself up. Nicholas turned the bodies off and found a Greek soldier below, whom he carried into the shade, and fetched him water. The man was but slightly wounded in the arm, the gash was already beginning to clot over, and Nicholas, having bound up the place with a strip of his fustanella, left him, for there was much work to be done.