Chapter XIII

A NEW PRETENDER

A sudden wave of delight, a sudden rush of blood through his veins, swept before it and away for that time all memory of his struggle and his resolution to renounce her.  All that was left was the irresistible storm of impulse upon his reserve and his self-control.

When she recognized him, she started violently, smote her hands together and gazed at him with such overweening joy written on her face, that he would have swept her into his arms, but for her quick recovery and retreat.  In shelter behind the exedra she halted, fended from him by the marble seat.  He gazed across its back at her with all the love of his determined soul shining in his eyes.

“You!  You!” she cried.

“But you!” he cried back at her across the exedra.

The preposterousness of their greetings appealed to them at that moment and they both laughed.  He started around the exedra; she moved away.

“Stay!” he begged.  “I want only to touch—­your hand.”

Shyly, she let him take both of her hands, and he lifted them in spite of her little show of resistance and kissed them.

“We might have saved ourselves farewells and journeyed together,” he said blithely.

“But I thought you had gone back to Ephesus,” she said.

“What!  After you had told me you were going to Jerusalem?  No.  I have been nursing a knife wound in a sheep hovel in the hills since an hour after I saw you last.”

Her lips parted and her face grew grave, deeply compassionate and grieved.  If there remained any weakness in his frame before that moment, the spell of her pity enchanted him to strength again.  He found himself searching for words to describe his pain, that he might elicit more of that curative sweet.

“I was very near to death,” he added seriously.

“What—­what happened?” she asked, noting the pallor on his face under the suffusion which his pleasure had made there.

“There was one more in the party than was needed; so my amiable companion reduced the number by stabbing me in the back,” he explained.

There was instant silence.  Slowly she drew away from him.  Entire pallor covered her face and in her eyes grew a horror.

“Did—­do you say that Philadelphus stabbed—­you—­in the back?” she asked, speaking slowly.

“Phila—­” he stopped on the brink of a puzzled inquiry, and for a space they regarded each other, each turning over his own perplexity for himself.

“Ask me that again,” he commanded her suddenly.  “I did not understand.”

She hesitated and closed her lips.  Her husband had stabbed this man in the back!  Because of her?  No!  Philadelphus had refused to believe her.  Why then should he have committed such a deed?

“So you are not ready to believe it of this—­Philadelphus?” he asked, venturing his question on an immense surmise that was forcing itself upon him.