He was touched presently, and a cup of milk was silently put to his lips.  He drank and turning himself with effort fell asleep.

When he awoke again, after many hours, it was night.  In the door with his head dropped back between his shoulders gazing up at the sky overhead, sat the boy.

“Where,” the Maccabee began, “are the rest of you?”

The boy turned around quickly, and answered with all seriousness.

“I am all here.”

“Did you,” the Maccabee began again, after silence, “care for me alone?”

“There has been no one here but us,” the boy said, hesitating at the symptoms of gratitude in the Maccabee’s voice.

“Us?”

“You and me.”

After another silence, the Maccabee laughed weakly.

“It requires two to constitute ‘us’ and I am, by all signs, not a whole one!”

“But you will be in a few days,” the boy declared admiringly.  “You are an excellent sick man.”

The Maccabee looked at him meditatively.

“I am merely perverse,” he said darkly; “I knew it would be so much pleasure to my murderer to know that I died, duly.”

The shepherd repressed his curiosity, as the best thing for his patient’s welfare, and suggested another subject rather disjointedly.

“I have been thinking,” he said, “about Jerusalem.  I was there once upon a time.”

“Once!” the Maccabee said.  “You are old enough to attend the Passover.”

“But our people do not attend the feast.  We are Christians.”

The Maccabee moved so that he could look at the boy.  He might have known it, he exclaimed to himself.  It was just such an extreme act of mercy, this assuming the care of a stranger in a wilderness, as he had ever known Christians to do in that city of irrational faiths, Ephesus.

“Well?” he said, hoping the boy would go on and spare him an expression on that announcement.

“I can not forget Jerusalem.”

“No one forgets Jerusalem—­except one that falls in love by the wayside,” the man said.

Again the boy detected a ring of unexplained melancholy in his patient’s voice, and talked on as a preventive.

“Urban, the pastor, took me there.  It was in the days of mine instruction for baptism.  He went to Jerusalem to trial, but there was disorder in the city about the procurator, who was driven out that day, and Urban was not called.  But he remained, lest he be accused of fleeing, and then it was he took me over the walks of Jesus.”

“Jesus—­that is the name,” the Maccabee said to himself.  “They are born, given in marriage, fall or flourish, live and die in that name.  Likewise they pick up a wounded stranger and care for him in that name.  They are a strange people, a strange people!”