Though the place held a great number of refugees, the footstep of the Maccabee wakened resounding emptiness.  At the threshold he slackened his step and looked with pathetic anxiety at whatever light on Laodice’s face would show her opinion of her refuge.  But the uncertain torch revealed nothing and he led her in and across to a solitary place where rugs from some looted house had been folded up for a pallet and spread about for carpets.  She sat down and awaited his speech.

He motioned to the spacious barrenness about him.

“Canst thou content thyself in this place?” he asked, hesitating.

She nodded, but feeling that her reply had not shown all that words might, she lifted her face that he might see therein that which she could not trust her lips to say.

It was her undoing.  Her weakness overwhelmed her and burying her face in the folds of her mantle, she wept.

After a dismayed silence, he bent over her and said with a quiver of distress in his voice: 

“I—­I have work, here, to do, but I shall take thee out of the city for better refuge—­”

That she should seem to be grieving over the nature of the shelter given her, stirred her deeply.  She half rose and with the light shining on her face, filled with gratitude in spite of her tears, took his hand in both of hers and pressed it with pathetic insistence.

He understood her.

He laid a hand unsteady with its tremor of delight and young eagerness upon the vitta and it slipped off her hair.  As it dropped, the subtle warm fragrance of the heavy locks, now braided in maidenly style, reached him; the liveliness of her relaxed young figure communicated itself to him without his touch; all the invitation of her helplessness swept him to the very edge of abandoning his restraint.  On his dark face a transformation occurred.  All the hardness, even his years and his experience vanished from him and a soft recovering flush faintly colored his cheeks.  In that sudden bloom of beauty in his face was stamped a realization of the far progress of his triumph.  She was in his house and dependent on him, within the very reach of his arms.

When she looked up at him again, she read all this in his face, and instantly there returned to her, with warning intensity, the fear of her love of him.  The last obstacle but her own conscience that stood between her and his perfect supremacy over her life had suddenly been swept away.

She started away from him, and put up her hands to ward off his touch.

“If you do that,” she said in a tone sharp with distress, “it is sin and I shall be cursed!  I shall have to go back to him!”

Then she had voluntarily left Julian, perhaps to seek him!

“You shall not go back to him!” he exclaimed.  “After I have given up everything but my life to have you for myself!”

“You must not think of me in that way!” she commanded him vehemently.  “I am a married woman!  You shall remember that!  If you forget it, I will go out into the streets and ask the Idumeans to kill me!”