"Yield us the woman!" the mob roared in the interval. "Give us the woman and save yourselves!" Those about the alabarch, hearing the demand of the mob, turned great terror-strained eyes upon Lydia, and she hid her face in her father's shoulder. The smell of burning pitch penetrated the interior; pungent smoke assailed the nostrils of the keeper, who smiled grimly, assuming that the mob hoped to burn the Synagogue. But there followed an explosion of steam, split by a sharp report, and followed by a howl of exultation. The keeper with wild eyes sprang at the valve. Immediately the hammering of the ram reverberated through the gloom. The alabarch understood. They were cracking the stone with fire and water and beating in the fractures with a ram. Then the forty thousand within realized their extremity. The murmur increased to an even groan of terror, and here and there, as some more acutely realized the desperate straits, frantic screams would rive through the drone of misery. Above it all the ram beat its sentence of doom upon the gate. Splintering rock began to fall on the inner side of the assaulted portal. The keeper put his hands over his ears and turned away from the sight. Let but a breach be made wide enough to admit a hand to undo the bolts and hideous death would pour in upon the shuddering captives within. Without, above the noise of the ram, the roar of the multitude continued: "Give up the woman ere it is too late!" Under the light of fires falling from above, hundreds of white faces in the mad mass turned toward Lydia. A lozenge of stone large enough to admit a man's body shaped itself in the gate under the ram, and the next instant shot out and fell near the keeper. With it came a hoarse roar of triumph, drowning a scream of despair. A dozen arms came through the opening and fumbled for the bolts. The keeper seized the fragment of stone and hurled it at the intruding arms. It struck fair and with vicious force. Howls of pain went up. The limp arms were dragged out and as others came in the keeper bounded to the gate and catching up his missile beat madly upon flesh and bone until the besiegers abandoned their search for the bolts. The thunder of assault began again, for the gate could not hold long. The trapped victims shrieked and out of the mass fingers pointed at Lydia. Suddenly, she stood away from her father's arm. Walking to one of the keepers of the unassaulted gates, she said to him: "I am she whom they want without! Let me forth!" A tall spare old man, one of the strangers who had entered last, approached her. But the girl motioned him aside and he made the sign of the cross over her. Her father, watching her, did not realize until the keeper undid the bolts which held the wicket, or subsidiary gate in the large one, that Lydia meant to pass out into the night. With a cry, he sprang after her. A hush fell in the Synagogue. CHAPTER XXXIII THE DREGS OF THE CUP OF FURY