“The monster is safe, safe!” the girl protested.  “He does not sing, and from what I caught through the crack of the door, the pretty stranger had better not.  My lady, the princess, had a merry time with my lord, the prince, at breakfast this morning, all about this same pretty one.  So this is why she breakfasts with us—­the second table.”

Laodice heard this with a sinking heart.  This was a strange house in which to live at no definite status, with a future blank and inscrutable.

“Is it, then, that you are wary of offending the over-nice exactions of music, that you do not sing?” the athlete demanded of Juventius.

“Song,” replied the singer gravely, “is originally the expression of the highest exaltation.  To sing before the high mark of feeling is reached is an insincerity.”

“Alas, Juventius,” the girl was saying, “how much difficulty you lay up for yourself in determining the limits of art!  Teach broadly and the fulfilment of your laws will not be such a task for the overworked and irritable gods of art.”

“Child!” Juventius cried passionately.  “Your ignorance outreaches your presumption!”

“Fie!  Fie!” the athlete put in comfortably.  “Let us make a truce, for I announce to you the opportunity each to have whatever you wish.  We are to have at the proper moment, according to the Jews, a celestial visitation which will enable us to have what we most desire.”

“You announce it!” the girl scoffed indignantly.  “I have heard of that ever since I was born!”

“I, too, have heard it,” said Juventius.

“Well,” said the unabashed athlete, “the Pharisee that brings Amaryllis her fruit is so full of it that he gets prophecies mixed with his prices and the patriarchs with his fruit.  He says that there are those that declare he is already in the city.”

“That he has been seen?” Juventius asked, after a little silence.

“No; merely suspected.  They say that things go on in the Temple which seem to show that some resident of their Olympus already inhabits the air.”

“I saw Seraiah to-day,” one of the women said in a low voice.

“Silent as ever?  Spotless as ever?  Mysterious as ever?” the athlete asked.

The woman who had spoken shook her head at him as if alarmed.

“I can not bear to hear him ridiculed,” she said.  “Somehow it seems blasphemous.  They say he marks every one who laughs in his hearing.”

“They are not many,” the girl said.  “For the most part, the citizens of Jerusalem feel as apprehensive about him as you do.”

“I wonder that John will stay in the Temple with a god in it,” Juventius said, as if he had not heard the rest of the discussion.

“John!” the athlete exclaimed.  “John is an adventurer that believes in nothing, has no cause and furthers this warfare for loot and the possible chance of escape when the conflict comes.”

“Simon is different,” another said.  “Now he is wild and mad and insolent and foolhardy, because he believes that, no matter what tangle the situation is in, the celestial emissary he expects will straighten it out for him.”