“This is what cometh of handmaids and animal gifts upon the altar. Think ye your fathers would have been thus led to evil. Oh, ye fools of Atlantis!”
She eyed the islanders about her with such derision that they forgot their terror, and felt like rushing upon her in a body.
A gray-haired, quivering man retorted:
“It is well for thee, old Nogoa, to stand there and taunt us islanders when it is known thou hast ever been loudest in favor of these new doings. Oh, thou old feather that goeth with the wind! Have a care—or thou wilt be more dragged in the dirt than thou hast been!”
“Hah, it is the craven Puppo who speaketh,” returned Nogoa viciously. “He who saw his daughter forced into the inner holy place, and lifted not his voice to man or heaven against it. It seemeth he can cry out only when an old woman talketh.”
Puppo darted for her. As she fell over backward in her effort to get out of his reach, a tall young man rushed between them.
“Puppo, she speaketh truth. Thou wert a craven; and hast been a toad to king and priests ever since. Look at me,” he continued to the people. “Dear to me was his daughter Lota, and I would have made her my wife. And in an hour—ah instant—the world became black to me. But became it black to him? Hath he not laughed with the loudest, bent the lowest, slept through it? Thou worse than hypocrite! Get thee away!”
He looked so evilly upon Puppo, and was so seconded by those listening, that Puppo, after a wicked glance at old Nogoa who had been lifted up and placed on a fallen bough, slunk off.
The young man continued: “Nogoa, though as false, as full of guile as Puppo, is right in this: we have looked on when Atlano and Oltis changed the worship in these vile ways with never a nay. For this, woe is upon us! I come from my cave on yon mount where the fires rage to bid you flee in your galleys while there is time.”
“Why dost thou not flee, Monon? Show us the way,” screeched Puppo, who was now brave because he was quite well to one side.