The Greek, with shining eyes and smiling lips, began slowly to raise himself.
Then the one with the black curls and silken beard tore himself from the foremost of the crowd and rushed toward the portico.
The dancer saw him come. She moved toward the edge of the cornice. The Greek leaped: the other below flung up his arms, but the roar of the multitude swept away the cry that came from his lips.
The dancer, eluding the triumphant Greek, rushed over the brink of the portico and dropped like a plummet entangled in gossamer into the upreached arms of Marsyas below.
Both fell like stones. But Marsyas sprang up with his prize in his arms, and fled up the steps through the black porch and the stone valves into the Temple of Rannu.
[Illustration: Marsyas sprang up with his prize in his arms (missing from book)]
Outside, the multitude, having seen Flora flout her rightful possessor, fell for a moment silent. Then, a part having but one desire to choose for itself, fell to its own choosing; but the rest, already cheated of blood and spoil, howled their disapproval, fought their way through disinterested masses in order to reach the refuge of the capricious Flora, met resistance and precipitated warfare, and in an incredibly short time, bedlam reigned in the square before the Temple of Rannu.
The public celebration of the Feast of Flora was at an end. Meanwhile there was a trail of yellow roses, beginning abruptly in the Nazarene community and leading around every household and out and on toward the west. The roses lay untouched and wilting through the night and were shoveled up and carted away by the street-cleaners the next morning. And on the summit of the Gate of the Necropolis, a painted beauty sat in jewels and flowers and little raiment, and wondered why she was not sought and found and why her followers stayed and roared before the Temple of Rannu.