Laodice bowed her head.

“It is this:  Titus and his friend, Nicanor, approached too close the walls this day, and Nicanor was wounded by an arrow.  In retaliation, perfect siege hath been laid about the walls.  None may come into the city.”

“And—­Momus, my servant,” Laodice cried, waking for the first time to the calamity in this blockade, “he can not come back to me?”

“No.  If he attempts it, he will be captured and put to death.”

Laodice clasped her hands, while drop by drop the color left her face.

“In God’s name,” she whispered, “what will become of me?”

Amaryllis made no answer.

“Can—­can I not go out?” Laodice asked presently, depending entirely on the Greek as adviser.

“You can—­but to what fortune?  Perhaps—­” She stopped a moment.  “No,” she continued, “you have never been in a camp.  No; you can not go out.”

“What, then, am I to do?” Laodice cried with increasing alarm.

Amaryllis shrugged her shoulders.

“I can advise with John,” she said.  “Doubtless he will allow you to remain here until you can provide yourself with other shelter.”

Laodice heard this cold sentence with a chill of fear that was new to her.  Faint pictures of hunger and violence, terrifying in the extreme, confronted her.  Yet not any of them frightened her more than the offered favor of the Gischalan.  Her indignation at the woman who had supplanted her swept over her with a reflexive flush of heat.

“God of my fathers, judge her in her lies, and pour the fire of Thy wrath upon her!” she exclaimed vehemently.

Amaryllis gazed curiously at the girl.  In her soul, she asked herself if there might not be unsounded depths of fierceness in this nature which she ought not to stir up.

“Thou hast hope,” she said tactfully.  “She hath no such beauty as thine!”

“Nothing but my proofs!” Laodice broke in.

“And Philadelphus is a young man.”

“Rejecting her only because I am fairer than she!  He is no just man!” Laodice cried hotly.

“Softly, child,” the Greek said, smiling; “thou hast said that he is thy husband.”

Laodice turned away, her brain whirling with anger, fear and shame.

“Well?” said the Greek coolly, after a silence.

“Where shall I go?” Laodice asked.

“Thou hast been too tenderly nurtured to go into the streets.  I shall ask John to shelter thee until thou canst care for thyself.”

Laodice looked at her without understanding.

“Thou canst not stay here for long because the wife to Philadelphus is in a way a power in my house and she will not suffer it.  But never fear; Jerusalem is not yet so far gone that it would not enjoy a pretty stranger.”

The curious sense of indignation that possessed Laodice was purely instinctive.  Her mind could not sense the actual insult in the Greek’s words.