accounts and then with enthusiasm traced his steps by its stony, hilly streets from forum to stadium and from school to museum?  Had she not dreamed of its shallow port, its rugged highways and its skyey marshes?  It had been her pride to know Ephesus, although she had never laid eyes upon it.  Even she had come to believe that she would know an Ephesian by his aggressive joy in life!  It went hard with her to deny that she knew that city which she had all but seen.

The Maccabee observed her hesitation and when she looked up to answer, his eyes full of question were resting upon her.

“I do not know Ephesus,” she said quickly.  “Are—­are you a native?”

“No.”

She wanted mightily to know if he had met the young Philadelphus in that city, but she feared to ask further lest she betray him.

“A great city,” he went on, “but there are greater pagan cities.  It is not like Jerusalem, which has no counterpart in the world.  Even the most intolerant pagan is curious about Jerusalem.”

She looked again at his face.  It was not Greek or Roman, neither more indicative of her own blood.

“Are you a Jew?” she asked.

He remembered that she had seen him in a synagogue.

“I was,” he said after a silence.

She looked at him a moment before she made comment.

“I never heard a Jew say it that way before.”

He acknowledged the rebuke with the flash of a smile that appeared only in his eyes.

“A Jew entirely Jewish wears the mark on him.  You have had to ask if I were a Jew.  Would I be consistent to claim to be that which in no wise shows to be in me?”

“It is time to be a Jew or against the Jews,” she said gravely.  “There is no middle ground concerning Judea at this hour.”

Serious words from the lips of a woman in whom a man expects to find entertainment are obtrusive, a paradox.  Still the new generosity in his heart for this girl made any manner she chose, engaging, so that it showed him the sight of her face and gave him the sound of her voice.

“Seeing,” he said, “that it is the hour of the Jewish hope, is it politic for us to declare ourselves for its benefits?”

“The call at this hour,” she exclaimed reproachfully, “is to be great in sacrifice—­not for reward.  It is the word of the prophets that we shall not attain glory until we have suffered for it.  We have not yet made the beginning.”

She touched so familiarly on his own thoughts which had haunted him since ambition had awakened in him in his boyhood, that his interest in his own hope surged to the fore.

“How goes it in Jerusalem?” he asked earnestly.

“Evilly, they say,” she answered, “but I have not been in the city.  Yet you see Judea.  That which has destroyed it threatens the city.  Jews have no friends abroad over the world.  We need then our own, our own!”

“Trust me, lady, for a good Jew.  I have said that I had been one, because I admit how far I have drifted from my people.  But I am going back!”