The priests seized her by the shoulder, wrenching her away, and one hurled her with a fury of loathing back into the darkness of the passage.  Then they forced their prisoner forward, stumbling, resisting, to the carriage.  The door snapped to, the horses plunged forward, and the carriage thundered away into the night.  Esther picked herself up from where she had fallen in the passage, and bruised and trembling, but with a joyous smile, rushed up the narrow stairway.

“Solomon!” she said, whispering in the old Jew’s ear, “Hiram has gone in the place of Nicholas!  Nicholas is safe here.  Oh, help us to get to the sea!”

Solomon shook with laughter as he heard—­for a Jew loves dearly a clever ruse—­and he stroked Esther’s soft hair as she stood by him.

“Light us a lamp, and let us get away to the shore, that we can embark and be away on the water at dawn, before they discover it and return,” Then she passed by him and entered the room where Nicholas awaited her.  Solomon trimmed a lamp and a lantern for them, and put up some bread and meat for their journey, his shoulders shaking with inward chuckles as he did so.

“Hiram a priest!” he repeated to himself; “that is a joke indeed, and Esther, what a quick brain she has—­a true daughter of Israel!” and Esther was murmuring within to Nicholas: 

“Jehovah has saved us.  Now let us hasten down to the sea.”

The next morning, when the dawn broke soft and rosy over the fair plain of Jericho, the sea that is called the Dead Sea, yet seems, in its glorious wealth of colour and sparkling brilliance to be rather the emblem of Life, glowed and flashed like a huge sapphire in the sun’s rays, and at its calm edge, that meets the shore without a ripple, swayed gently the ship of the pilgrims from the Jewish Colony.

Nicholas and Esther sat side by side watching the pilgrims’ oars dip quietly in perfect rhythm as they sang.  And the song of praise went up through the golden air, and echoed back to the sunny, silent strand vanishing behind them.

V

Dawn was breaking over the desert.  Steadily the triumphant rose spread upward in the pale opalescent sky, and broad waves of light rippled slowly over the wide level plain.  The little keen breeze of the morning, the herald of the dawn that runs ever in front of its chariot, stirred the branches of the palm trees by the Nile, and played a moment idly with the flap of a tent door before it passed onward.  Here, some two miles away from cool Assouan, lying out in the desert, was the Bishareen encampment, and the last small tent of the long line had its door open, and the flap of the awning loose, with which the morning wind stopped to play.

Within, seated cross-legged on the scarlet rug and sheepskin which formed their bed, were two girls braiding their hair before a tiny square of glass, which each in turn held up for the other.