Tiberias, a pagan city—­his plan for leading her on a false trail.  Others, he said, spoke more unfavourably than he did; and he continued in this strain until Rachel, losing patience, interrupted him suddenly saying that Azariah did not live in Tiberias.  If not in Tiberias, he answered, in a suburb, and within a stone’s throw of the city walls.  But what has that got to do with Joseph?  Rachel asked.  What has it got to do with Joseph!  Dan growled, when to reach the scribe’s house he has to pass through lanes infested with the off-scourings of the pagan world:  mummers, zanies, jugglers, dancers, whores from Babylon.  Did ye not hear him, woman, describe these lanes, saying that he had to change his course three times so that he might keep his promise to Azariah, and are ye not mindful that he told me, and you sitting there listening on that very stool, that the showmen he met in Argob orchard put a spell upon him, and that it was the demon that had obtained temporary lodgment in him that had bidden him to Tiberias to see the cock-fight:  Jews from Alexandria, heretics, adventurers, beggars, aliens!  Look ye here, Dan, Rachel said, he is a proud boy and may thank thee little for—­There are others to teach him, Dan interrupted, and continued to walk up and down the room, for he wished to make an end of this talk with his mother.  But he hadn’t crossed the room twice when he was brought to a full stop, having remembered suddenly that it is always by such acts as he was now meditating that fathers lose the affections of their sons.  If he were to drag Joseph away from Azariah, from whom he was learning Hebrew and Greek, Joseph might begin to look upon him as a tyrant.  His mother was a sharp-witted woman, and very little was needed to set her thinking.  She had an irritating way of looking as it were into his mind, and if she were to suspect him of jealousy of Azariah he would never have a moment’s peace again.

But what in the world may we understand from all this bear-dancing up and down the room? asked Rachel.  Ye must know if you are going to withdraw the boy from his schooling.

Dan cast an angry glance at his mother and hated her; and then his heart misgave him, for he knew that he lacked courage to take Joseph out of his present schooling, and dared not divide his house against himself, or do anything that might lose him his son’s love and little by little cause himself to be looked upon as a tyrant.  He knew himself to be a weak man, except in the counting-house; he knew it, and must stifle his jealousy of Azariah, who had forgiven Joseph his truancy and was the only one that knew of the excursion into Tiberias.  But Azariah’s indulgence did not altogether please him.  He began to suspect it and to doubt if he had acted wisely in not ordering Joseph away from Azariah:  for Azariah was robbing him, robbing him of all that he valued in this world, his son!  And it seemed to him a little later in the day, as he closed his ledger, that he had come to be disregarded in his own house; and he thought he would have liked much better to stay away, to dine in the counting-house, urging a press of business.  The first thing he would hear would be “Azariah.”  The hated name was never off the boy’s lips:  he talked of nothing else but Azariah and Hebrew and Greek and the learned Jews whom he met at Azariah’s house.