“Nay, peace, peace!  I shall do you no harm!  You are frightened!  I will do nothing that you would not have me do!  Be comforted.  Not any one in all the world has your happiness at heart so much as I. Believe me!”

“Believe me!” she insisted.  “I am weary of doubt and denial.  I am only safe if you recognize me as that which I claim to be.  Answer me!  You do believe I am the wife of Philadelphus?”

“I believed it, at once,” he said frankly.

“Then—­then—­” but she flung her hands over her face and slipped down on the rugs.  For a moment he hesitated, restraining the impulse to break over the limits she had laid down for him.

Then he rose and, summoning one of the women who had taken refuge in the crypt, sent her to remain with the girl, and departed, shaken and uncertain, to his own place.

Chapter XVIII

IN THE SUNLESS CRYPT

The twilight of the cavern rarely revealed enough of the features of her fellows to Laodice for her to identify them or for them to identify her.  She lived among them a dusky shadow among shadows.  And because of her fear that Philadelphus might be searching for her, she stayed in the sunless crypt day by day until the Maccabee, noting with affectionate distress that she was growing white and weak, bade her take one of the women and venture up to the light.

There were, besides the women, two men who took no part in the preparation for war which went on about them in the cavern day and night.  While weapons and armor were made and tramping ranks formed and broke before the commands of the lithe dark commander of that fortress and subdued but fierce councils took place around torches—­while all this went on, they kept back, even apart from the women, and said nothing.

Laodice saw that they were physically unfit; that one was very old and the other very feeble and her heart warmed again to that stern master who saw them fed as abundantly as his most valued men.  These, then, were those Christians whom he had taken into his protection because of the Name which had inspired a shepherd boy to save his life.

When he commanded Laodice to go up into the sunlight, he approached the corner in which the two useless men hid and bade them, too, to go up into the air.

“Let us have no sickness in this place,” he said bluntly and turned on his heel and left them to obey.

Laodice took one of the older women and timidly climbing the steps from which the rubbish had been pushed away by the climbing hundreds, went through the dusk of the passage that terminated in a brilliancy that dazzled her.  And as she walked she heard the footsteps of the two men behind her.

Up in the chaos of fallen columns, she stood a moment with her hands pressed over her eyes.  Only little by little was she able to permit the full blaze of the Judean sun to reach them.  The uproar on Jerusalem after the muffled silence of the underground cavern filled her with terror, and she pressed close to the shelter of the entrance until the woman at her side reassured her.