“Enough of that!” he exclaimed.  “What ails you, man?”

Julian caught his breath and after a silence replied in a voice considerably sweetened that Aquila was a conscienceless pagan and not to be praised till he was dead.  But the Maccabee, with the girl uppermost in his mind, believed that his cousin was inwardly resenting his preemption of the pretty stranger.  The fact that Julian had changed the pace of their advance confirmed him in this suspicion.  From the smart trot that they had maintained from the time they had left Caesarea, they had declined to a walk.  Julian next showed inclination to loiter.  He spent an unusual length of time at every spring at which they watered their horses; an unseen break in his harness engaged a prolonged halt on the road; he stopped at an unroofed hut to rouse sleeping Passover pilgrims who had taken refuge within to ask how far they were from Jerusalem, and wrangled with the sleepy Jew for many minutes over the hazy estimate the man had given him.  With each of these pretenses the Maccabee’s conviction grew that the girl had something to do with the altered behavior of his cousin.  And with that growing conviction, he became the more convinced that he ought to maintain an espionage of Julian.

At midnight they were both tired, exasperated, moody, and determined against each other.  They had not journeyed thirty furlongs.

In one of the high valleys in the hills a great well bubbled up from a hollow by the road, overflowed the stone basin that the ancients had built for it and wasted itself in the undrained soil about.  Here, then, was one of the few marshes in Judea.  The road by a series of arches crossed it and continued up the shoulder of the hills toward the east.  All about it flourished the young growth of the rough sedge grass, green as emerald.  The spot was treeless and marked with broad low hummocks of new sod.

Julian halted.

“Shall we camp here?” he asked.

“It hath the recommendation of variety,” the Maccabee said wearily.  “Eheu!  How I shall miss the greensward of Ephesus!  Yes, we’ll camp!”

They dismounted and while Julian unpacked their blankets, the Maccabee collected dead reeds and cedar twigs and built a fire.  Then he stretched himself by the sweet-smelling flame.

“She can not have kept up with our horses; indeed it is unlikely that they moved far,” he thought, and thus assured that there was no danger to the girl for whom he had become a self-constituted guardian, he ate a piece of bread, drank a cup of wine and fell asleep.

His slumber was not entirely unconscious.  So long as the movements of his cousin continued regular about him, he lay still, but once, when Julian approached too near, his eyes opened full in the face of the man about to lean over him.  The Ephesian raised himself hastily and the Maccabee’s eyes closed again.

“A pest on an eye that only half sleeps!” Julian said to himself.  “He hasn’t lost count on the minutes since he left Caesarea!”