“I do not know that she is lovely.”

“What!” Julian exclaimed in genuine amazement.  “You do not know that she is lovely!  Years of correspondence with a woman whom you do not know to be lovely!  Reposing kingdoms on a woman’s influence whom you do not know to be beautiful!”

“Beauty is no tie,” the Maccabee retorted.  “Have you forgotten Salome, the Jewish actress who could play Aphrodite in the theaters of Ephesus, to the confusion of the goddess herself?  They said she snared three procurators and an emperor at one performance and lost them in a day!”

“Have you seen her?” Julian asked with a sidelong glance.  “Till your own eyes prove it, you should not accept that she is so bewitching.”

“There is no need that I should see her; Aquila swears it!  And I would take his word against the testimony of even mine own eyes.”

Julian looked up in a startled manner and hurriedly looked away again.  A half-frightened, half-amused smile played about his lips.

“Aquila is no judge of woman,” he said finally.  “And furthermore, they say she got to trifling with magic and prowling about the temples to see if the gods came true.  They were afraid she would get them blasted along with her sometime for her sacrilege.  I know all this because Aquila declared she attached herself to him in sheer poverty in Ephesus and swore to follow him to the ends of the earth.”

The Maccabee smiled.

“Nevertheless, he told me that he was afraid of her, but that she was a woman and in need and he could not reject her.”

Julian’s eyes grew insinuating.

“How much then your behavior this morning would have shocked him!” he murmured.

The smile died on the Maccabee’s face.  Reference to the girl in the hills seemed blasphemy on this man’s lips.

“And you do not recall your wife’s face?” Julian persisted.

The Maccabee’s face hardened more.  But he shook his head.

“Fourteen years can change a woman from a beauty to—­a—­a Christian, ugly and old and cold,” Julian augured.

The Maccabee turned his head away from his tormentor and Julian’s laughter trailed off into a half-jocular groan.

“How much you harp on beauty!” the Maccabee said deliberately.  “Are you then going to regret the actresses you left behind when I tore you from your exalted calling as the forelegs of the elephant in the theaters at Ephesus?”

Julian’s face blackened.  A foolhardy daring born of rage resolved him at that instant.  He flung himself out from his saddle and raised his hand with a knife clenched in it.  But the Maccabee with a composed laugh caught the hand and wrenching it about, dropped it, red and contracting with pain, at his companion’s side.

“Tut!  Julian, you are a bad combatant.  If you must make way with a man,” the Maccabee advised, “stab him in the back.  It is sure—­for you.  Ha!  Is this Emmaus we see?”