The white light from the day without revealed to him in a few steps, a veiled woman, a deformed old man and a young rabbi.  He did not need to take the evidence of her dress or of her companion to recognize under this veil the girl whom he had won from Julian of Ephesus, in the hills, that very morning.

As if in response to his inner hope that she would see him, she raised her eyes at the moment she passed, and started quickly.  Even under the shelter of her veil he saw her flush.

The next instant she was out of the synagogue and gone.

The Maccabee hesitated restlessly, forgot his mission to the synagogue and then, with no definite purpose, followed.

At the edge of town, where the huddle of huts left off and the gravel and rock and cedar began, he saw the priest dismiss the pair with his blessing and turn back.

Undecided, restless and regretful, the Maccabee lingered, looking after her as she went into the hills, unattended, except for an anomalous old man.  The sun of noon shone on her silver dress that the dust of the wayside had not tarnished.  He was gloomy and wistful without understanding his discomfort, and afraid for the beautiful unknown going out for seven days into the unfriendly wilderness.

There was the click of a horse’s hoof beside him.  He glanced up with a nervous start to see Julian of Ephesus, scowling, at hand.

“It is time,” he said, “for us to be off.”

The Maccabee instantly determined that Julian of Ephesus should not come up with this defenseless girl again.

“I am not ready,” he returned promptly.

“It was three days, this morning, that you have lost.  To-morrow it will be four.”

“And Sabbath, it will be seven.  A long time, a long time!”

The Maccabee turned and went back to the khan.  A gap in the hills had hidden the girl in the silver tissue, and the blitheness of the Maccabee’s spirit had gone with her.

Chapter V

BY THE WAYSIDE

By sunset, the Maccabee and Julian of Ephesus had taken the road to Jerusalem again.

As they reached the crest of a series of ridges there lay before them a long gentle slope smooth and dun-colored as some soft pelt, dropping down into a tender vale with levels of purple vapor hanging over it.  At the end of this declivity, leagues in length, was a faint blue shape, cloudlike and almost merged with the cold color of the eastern horizon, but suddenly developing at its summit a delicate white peak.  The sunset reaching it as they rode changed the point to a pinnacle of ruby before their eyes.  Their shadows that had ridden before them merged with the shade over the world.  Then with a soft, whispery, ghost-like intaking of the breath, a quantity of sand on the straight road before them got up under their horses’ feet and moved away to another spot and dropped again with a peppering sound and was dead moveless earth again.  The little breath of wind from under the edge of the sky had fallen.