“I would advise you to be kind to Philadelphus.”

“But, but—­” Laodice cried, struggling with tears and shame, “he has this day offered insult to his own marriage with me, by asking that I live in shame with him till it could be proved that I am his wife!”

The Greek’s smile did not change.

“If we weigh all the unpleasantness of wedded life in too delicate a balance, my friend, I fear there would be little, indeed, that would escape condemnation as humiliating.”

Laodice raised her scarlet face to look in wonder at the Greek.  The cold smiling lips dismayed her for a moment.

“And thou seest no shame in this?” she faltered.

“Thou sayest he is thy husband; why resent it?”

“Dost thou not see—­see that—­what am I but a shameless woman, if I live with him, though I be married to him thrice over!”

“After all,” said the Greek, after a silence which said more than words, “it is the consciousness of your own integrity which must influence you; not what others think of you.  It is not as if your husband thought better of you than you really are.”

“And you believe that I—­” Laodice began and stopped, bewildered.

Amaryllis, smiling, moved toward the inner corridor of her house.  At the threshold of the arch she called back: 

“Please yourself, my friend,” and was gone.

Laodice was, by this time, stunned and intensely repelled.  The hand on which Amaryllis had laid hers in passing tingled under the touch.  Unconsciously she shook off the sensation of contact.  The whole clear white interior of the hall became instantly unclean.  Her standards of right and wrong were shaken; the wholesale assaults on her ideals left her shocked and unconfident.  She felt the panic that all innocent women feel when suddenly aroused to the unfitness of their surroundings.

When she turned to hurry to her room, a flood of scarlet rushed into her cheeks and she shrank back, shaken with surprise and delight.

Before her stood a man, pale and thin, with his eyes upon her.

Chapter XII

THE PRINCE RETURNS

Joseph, the shepherd, son of Thomas of Pella, moved out of the green marsh before sunset, as he had planned to do, but not for the original motive.  The sheep, indeed, would not have flourished in that dampness, rich as it was in young grass, but, more than that, there was no shelter for the wounded man who lay by the roadside.

The shepherd, who knew the hills of Judea as far as the Plain of Esdraelon as well as he knew the stony streets of the Christian city, located the nearest roof as one which a fagot-maker had occupied two years before.  It was some distance up in the hills to the west.  Since the scourge of war had passed over Palestine, there were scores of such hovels, vacant and abandoned to the bats and the small wild