“Does this other woman see no fault in this, your idleness?” she demanded.

“She!  By the Shades, she sees nothing in me but fault!  I would get me up like a sane man and go out of this mad place, but she hath locked up her dowry away from me, which was the simple cause that invited me to join her, and bids me go without her.  And I might—­but for one other attraction, dearer than the treasure, which also I would take with me.”

“Even if she forces you into deeds, I shall forgive her,” she declared at last.

He smiled a baffling smile and she looked at him in despair.  The very charm of his personal appearance awakened resentment in her; his deft and easy complaisance angered her because it could be effective.  She hated the superficial excellence in him which made him a pleasant companion.  He had refused to discuss her identity further, except to prevent her in her own attempts to identify herself.  He did not refer to the incidents of their journey to Jerusalem, but she felt that he was conscious of all these things, and her resentment was so great that she put it out of sight, lest at the time when she should be proved she would have come to hate him to the further thwarting of their work for Israel.

“It is sweet to have you concerned for me.  Now you may understand how much I am troubled for your own welfare.  Do not regard me with that unbending gaze.  I am, first and before all else, your friend.”

“You have changed,” she said slowly.  “I did not find in you this solicitude in the hills.”

“Unhappiness,” he sighed, “makes most men law-less.  I should be even now as bad, were I not sure of the sympathy you feel for me.”

She looked at him with large disdain.

“Does not this woman treat you well?” she asked with the first glimmer of sarcasm in her eyes.

“Her displeasure in me is that I do not make her a queen; yours, however, that I can not save this doomed nation!  Her ambitions are for herself; yours are for me.  Which waketh the response in my heart, lady?”

“What have I lived for?” she burst out.  “For what was I brought up and schooled?  For what have I sacrificed all the light and desirable things of my youth, but for—­”

“Nay!  Do not show me, yet, that you are only bent on being queen!” he exclaimed.

“I care for nothing but the rescue of Judea!” she cried passionately.  “There is nothing left to me but that!”

“Then your ambitions are still for me.  Alas, that the Messiah has come and gone!”

It was his first reference to the great calamity he had told to her a short time before.  Its recurrence after she had resolved to regard it as an impossible and blasphemous tale brought a chill to her heart.

“If I can prove to you that there is no hope for Jerusalem, what then?” he asked suddenly.

She flung off the question with a gesture.

“Answer me.  What then?”