He smiled at her radiantly and went at once to his chambers.

When he reached the apartments, he found them silent and deserted.  He seized upon the opportunity as most propitious for a search for the possible hiding-place of the dowry of two hundred talents.

When he opened first the great press in which his lady kept her raiment he was confronted by emptiness.  Dismayed, he turned to look into the room and found the chests for the most part open and rifled.  On the brazier, now cold, lay a wax tablet.  He snatched it up and read: 

  Received of Julian of Ephesus the appended salvage in good repair. 
  Items:  One wife, Two hundred talents.

  JOHN, KING OF JERUSALEM.

He went back to the andronitis of Amaryllis.

“I have lost interest in the treasure,” he said whimsically.  “But I’ll go out and look for the girl.  I—­I should like to discover of a truth if the passage leads out of Jerusalem.”

Amaryllis closed her lips firmly.  Philadelphus read in the look that he could not escape without Laodice.

Without further speech, he went to the vestibule, took his cloak and kerchief from the porter and went out into the city.

It was nearly midnight when he passed into the streets.  The tumult of assault on the walls had ceased.  The long lines of beacon-fires on the walls showed only a few men in arms posted there.  Without there came no sound of activity in the camp of the Roman.  The streets below, lighted up by the ever-burning beacons, showed its usual restless tramping of houseless, hungry ones.  But there was no talk; each one who walked the passages went wrapped in his own dismal thoughts; the thousands took no notice of one another.  Jerusalem was as silent as a city stricken with plague.

From the summit of Zion, which Philadelphus mounted, he could see three Roman war-towers, planted along the outer works, dimly lighted, and manned by a vigilant garrison of legionaries.  These had been a dread and a destruction which the Jews had been unable to overthrow; coigns of vantage from which the enemy had been able to deal the sturdiest blows of the campaign.  They had permitted no rest to the defenders on the wall; they had spread ruin by fire and carnage, by arrow and sling for days.  Sorties against them had resulted in the death of their assailants, only.  Jewish engines accomplished nothing against them.  The three, alone, were taking Jerusalem.

Philadelphus looked at their tall shapes, black against the remote illumination of the Roman camp, and inwardly hoped that they would hold off complete destruction of the city, until he had found the desirable woman.

No one noticed him; men passed him like shadows with their eyes ever on the ground; no one spoke; nothing disturbed the deadly quiet of the falling city.