Thereafter followed three days of silence, except the essential communication or the mutterings of the Maccabee against his weakness and unsteadiness.  On the fourth day the Maccabee declared that he was able to travel.  Joseph protested, but not for long.  He had learned in the sojourn of his guest that this man was in the habit of doing as he pleased.  So the shepherd sighed and let him go reluctantly.

“But,” he insisted to the last moment, “remember that Pella is a City of Refuge.  If Jerusalem ceases to be hospitable, come to Pella.”

A thought struck him.

“She,” he said in a low tone, “promised that she would come.”

“Then expect me,” the Maccabee said.

The shepherd boy smiled contentedly and blessed the Maccabee and let him go.  As long as the man could see, his young host watched him, and at the summit of the hill the Maccabee turned to wave his final farewell.  When the path dipped down the other side of the hill, the man felt that more than the sunshine had been cut off by its great shadow.

He did not go forward with a light heart.  The whole of his purpose had suddenly resolved itself into duty.  There had been a certain nervous expectancy that was almost fear in the thought of meeting the grown woman he had married in her babyhood.  He had lived in Ephesus with an unengaged heart in all the crowd of opportunities for love, good and bad.  He had magnetism, strength, aloofness and a certain beauty—­four qualifications which had made him over and over again immensely attractive to all classes of Ephesian women.  But whatever his response to them, he had not loved.  Love and marriage were things so apart from his activities as to be uninteresting.  When finally he was called in full manhood to assume without preliminary both of these things, he was uncomfortable and apprehensive.  But after he had met the girl in the hills, his sensations of reluctance became emphatic, became an actual dread, so that he thrust away all thought of the domestic side of the life that confronted him, and bitterly resigned all hope in the tender things that were the portion of all men.  The villainy of Julian of Ephesus engaged him chiefly, and his punishment.  After that, then the establishment of his kingdom, politics, conquest and power—­but not love!

Late that afternoon, he stepped out of a wady west of Jerusalem and halted.

Ahead of him ran a road depressed between worn, hard, bare banks of earth, past a deserted pool, marged with stone, up shining surfaces of outcropping rock, through avenues of clustered tombs, pillars, pagan monuments which were tracks of the Herods, dead and abandoned, splendid pleasure gardens, suburban palaces lifeless and still, toward the looming Tower of Hippicus, brooding over a fast-closed gate.

The Maccabee nodded.  It was as he had expected.  The city was besieged.

It was afternoon, a week-day at the busiest portal of Jerusalem; but save for the fixed and pygmy sentry upon the tower, there was no living thing to be seen, no single sound to be heard.