Cries began suddenly somewhere nearer and instantly the tremendous booming of a great oriental gong from the heathen quarters swept heavy floods of sound over the outcry and drowned it.  The vultures flew up hastily and Costobarus saw them for the first time.  A chill rushed over him; revulsion of feeling showed vividly on his face.  He shut the window.

Noon was high over Ascalon and Pestilence was Caesar within its walls.

It was the penalty of warfare, the long black shadow that the passage of a great army casts upon a battling nation.  Physicians could not give it a name.  It seized upon healthy victims, rent them, blasted them and cast them dead and distorted in their tracks, before help could reach them.  It passed like fire on a high wind through whole countries and left behind it silence and feeding vultures.

As Costobarus turned from his window to pace up and down his chamber, Hannah’s argument came back to him with new energy.  He felt with a kind of panic that his confident answer to her might have been wrong.  When a girl appeared in the archway, he moved impulsively toward her, as if to retract the command that would send her out into this land that the Lord had spoken against, but the strength and repose in her face communicated itself to him.

Above all other suggestions in her presence was that overpowering richness of oriental beauty which no other kind in the world may surpass in its appeal to the loves of men.  Enough of the Roman stock in her line had given structural firmness and stature to a type which at her age would have developed weight and duskiness, but she was taller and more slender than the women of her race, and supple and alive and splendid.  About her hips was knotted a silken scarf of red and white and green with long undulant fringes that added to the lithe grace in her movements.  Under it was a glistening garment of silver tissue that reached to the small ankles laced about by the ribbons of white sandals.  For sleeves there were netted fringes through which the fine luster of her arms was visible.  About her wrists, her throat and in her hair, heavy and shining black, were golden coins that marked her steps with stealthy tinkling.

Costobarus, in spite of the shock of doubt and fear in his brain, looked at her as if with the happy eyes of the astonished Maccabee.  In those full tender lips, in the slope of those black, silken brows, in the sparkling behind the dusky slumbrous eyes, there was all the fire and generosity and limitless charm that should make her lover’s world a place of delight and perfume and music.

“How is it with you, Laodice?” he asked, faltering a little.

“I am prepared, my father,” she answered.

“I commend your despatch.  I would be gone within an hour.”

She bowed and Costobarus regarded her with growing wistfulness.  At this last moment his love was to become his obstacle, his fear for his child his one cowardice.