He opened his eyes and saw her, holding him in her arms.  Somewhere in the background were the faces of Momus and Aquila.  Between the pagan and the old servant passed a look that the old man caught.  Then he heard Aquila say: 

“The village—­his sole chance, if there is a physician there.”

Laodice held him fast only for a moment, when it seemed that she was wrenched away.  The dying man was glad.  If this were pestilence, she should not come near.  The hiss of the lash and the bound of the stung camel disturbed him but he lapsed into the immense cold again as they raced down the slight declivity toward the Syrian village.  But Pestilence was riding with them and the odds were with it.

But the dwellers of that little huddle of huts had nothing to do but to sit in their doorways and suspect.  Whatever came their way from the sea for many months had brought them disaster and long since they had learned to defend themselves.  So now, when a party riding at breakneck speed, bearing with them an old man on whom the inertia of death was plain, came across the frontiers of their little town, they met them with the convenient stones of their rocky streets, with their savage, stark-ribbed dogs, with offal from kitchen heap and donkey stall and with insults and curses.

“Away, ye bringers of plague!  Out, lepers; be gone, ye unclean!”

Laodice and Aquila who rode in the open were fair targets for half the hail that fell about them.  The girl groaned as the missiles fell into the howdah upon the helpless shape of Costobarus, who did not lift a hand to fend off the stones.  The pagan, bruised and raging, drew his weapon and spurred his horse to ride down his assailants, but they scattered before him and from safe refuge continued their assault with redoubled determination.

Momus, seeing only injury in attempting to enforce hospitality, turned his camel and, swinging around the outermost limits of the settlement, fled.  Aquila followed him, and a moment later the rest of the party joined them.

Without the range of the village, the party halted.  Momus and Aquila lifted Costobarus down and laid him on a rug that Laodice had spread for him.  But when she would have knelt by him, he motioned to Aquila not to permit her to approach.  The mute stood by his master.  In that countenance fast passing under shade was written charge and injunction as solemn as the darkness that approached him.

“Here, O faithful servant, is the wife of a prince, the daughter of thy master, the joy of thine own declining days.  Shield her against wrong and misfortune by all the strength that in thee lies, as thou hopest in the King to come and the reward of the steadfast.  Promise!”