“No!  Not a good man!  Verily!  But hath he no cause to be delinquent?”

“No!” she said stubbornly.  “He has judged her without seeing her, when, by your own words, he expects her to bring him fortune and position.  What is he bringing her?”

The Maccabee looked at her thoughtfully before he answered.

“Nothing!  Not even his heart!” he vowed.

Laodice caught her breath in an agony of indignation and distress.

“He does not in any way deserve—­” she stopped precipitately.  She was about to add “the great fortune he is to get,” when she realized that she was taking this husband nothing—­not even her own heart.  She went on, for the first time a little glad that she was penniless.

“He may find—­neither fortune, nor position, nor heart awaiting him!” she finished pointedly.

The Maccabee pulled one of his stubborn locks that had fallen over his eyes.  The smile grew less vivid.

He had no comment to make to this.  Meanwhile Laodice looked at him.

“Shall—­you be with—­your friend in Jerusalem?” she asked.

“It depends on his wife,” he retorted with a grimace.

She would be glad if this tall, comely trifler, with a voice as musical as some grave-toned viol, were to be seen from time to time to relieve the tedium of life with the offensive Philadelphus.  This admission instantly brought a shock to her.  She had learned to study herself in these last few days since she had become aware of the ways of the world.  Life was to be no longer a period of obedience to laws which the Torah had laid down; it was to be a long resistance against desirable things that she yearned for but which she dared not have.  She learned at this moment that she could be her own chief stumbling-block, and that love, the most precious illumination in every life, might be a destruction and a consuming fire.  She looked at this man, who lounged beside her, with a new sensation.  He was winsome, and therefore the more perilous.  That smooth insulting stranger whom this man had revealed as her husband with all his violence and license was a humble and harmless thing compared to this one, who had snared her by his care of her and by his charming self.

She felt a desire to cry out for Momus to take her back to the inner chamber of the shut house in Ascalon, away from her danger to herself and from the sight of the man who had done her no harm—­yet.

She did not know how plainly all this wrote itself on her candid face.  Wise pupil of that unbridled school, the city of Diana, he could read in that slight frown on her forehead and the pathetic curve of her lips, that she was contented with him—­that she was not glad to go on to that husband in Jerusalem.  He was near to her before she knew he had moved.

“After all,” he was saying in a low voice, “I am glad you are going to Jerusalem.  You shall not be lost from me again.  Whose house shall I ask for when I can not endure separation longer?”