The roar of the turning battle and the mob about her drowned his next words, except,

“You can not be happy in iniquity; neither blessed; but you are sure to be afraid.  Right has its own terror, but there is at least courage in being right, against your desires.”

He was talking continuously, but only at times did the wind from the uproar sweep his fervent words to her.

“Christ had His own conflict with Himself.  What had become of us had He listened to the tempter in the wilderness, or failed to accept the cup in the Garden of Gethsemane!  How much we have the happiness of Christ in our hands!  Alas! that His should be a sorrowful countenance in Heaven!

“The love of a man for a woman was near to the Master’s heart!  How can you feel that you must love and be loved in spite of Him!  Pity yourself all you may you can not then be pitied so much as He pities you!

“Love as long and as wilfully as you will, and then it is only a little space.  The time of the supremacy of Christ cometh surely, and that is all eternity!  Which will you do—­please yourself for an hour, or be pleased by the will of God through all time?  Love is in the hands of the Lord; you can not consign it longer than the little span of your life to the hands of the devil.”

Momus, in whose mind had passed an immense surmise, was again at her side.

“O daughter of a noble father,” his dumb gaze said, “wilt thou put away that virtue which was born in thee and let my labor come to naught?”

But the preaching of Nathan and the reproach of Momus were feeble, compared to the great tumult that went on in her soul.  She had seen John of Gischala cast Amaryllis aside.  Even the Greek’s sympathy was hateful to him.  Yet when Laodice had first entered the house of Amaryllis, the woman had been obliged to dismiss John from her presence for his own welfare and the welfare of the city.  Why this change?

Amaryllis was no less beautiful, no less brilliant, no less attractive than she had once been; but the Gischalan had wearied of her.

Laodice recalled that she had not been surprised to see the man throw Amaryllis aside.  It seemed to be the logical outcome of love such as theirs.  How, then, was she to escape that which no other woman escaped who loved without law?  In the soul of that stranger who had called himself Hesper, were lofty ideals, which had not been the least charm which had attracted her to him.  Was she, then, to dislodge these holy convictions, to take her place in his heart as one falling short of them, or were they still to exist as standards which he loved and which she could not reach?  In either event, how long would he love—­what was the length of her probation before she, too, would encounter the inevitable weariness?

It occurred to her, then, how nearly the natural law of such love paralleled the religious prohibition that the Christian had shown to her.  However harsh and unjust the sentence seemed, it was rational.  With her own eyes she had seen its predictions borne out.  Already the relief of the sorrowing righteous possessed her.  She turned to the Christian.