to herself, she was laid upon a spot of rough grass, in the shelter of an overhanging bluff. It was not the scene upon which her sorrow-stunned eyes had closed a while before. The village was nowhere in sight; the plain had been left behind; any further view was shut off by Aquila's horse, and the two camels whose bridles were in the hands of Hiram. Beside the stricken girl knelt Momus and Aquila; standing at her feet was a new-comer, on whom her wandering and half-conscious gaze rested.

He was an old man, clad in a short tunic, ragged of hem and girt about him with a rope. Barefoot, bareheaded and provided only with a staff and a small wallet, he was to outward appearances little more than one of the legion of mendicants that infested the poverty-stricken land of Judea. But his large eyes, under the tangle of wind-blown white hair and white shelving brows, were infinitely intelligent and refined. Now, they beamed with pity and concern on the bereaved girl.

But she forgot him the next instant, for returning consciousness brought back like a blow the memory of the death of her father.

From time to time she caught snatches of conversation between the old wayfarer and Aquila. They were spoken in low tones and only from time to time did they reach her.

"He was Costobarus, principal merchant of this coast," she heard Aquila explain shortly.

"I shall go on to Ascalon; I do not fear," the old man said next. "I shall bring his people to fetch his body. I marked the spot. Comfort her with that, when she can bear to talk of it."

"We go to Jerusalem," Aquila went on, some time later, "else we should turn back with him ourselves. But we dare not risk the pestilence on her account, for it seems that she is very necessary to the Jews at this hour–very necessary."

"I follow to the Holy City," the old wayfarer added at last. "The Passover is celebrated there within two weeks. But I shall not fail; nothing will harm me."

"What talisman do you carry to protect you?" the pagan asked a little irritably.

"No talisman, but the love of Jesus Christ, the Saviour!"

"A Christian!" Aquila exclaimed.

Even through her stupor of grief and hopelessness, Laodice heard this exclamation. Here, then, was one of the Nazarenes, that mysterious sect whose tenets she had never been permitted to hear; But also, she knew that the old apostate had braved the plague and had buried her father. She turned to look at him in time to see him extend his hands in blessing over her.

"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and his comfort be with you, for ever; amen. Farewell."

He was gone. Momus raised her in his arms and, lifting her into her howdah, laid her tenderly on the improvised reclining seat that had been made of the chair therein. In a twinkling the whole party had mounted, and passed swiftly on toward Jerusalem. As they moved forward, the strange woman murmured softly:

"Two!"

Laodice's camel mounted the slope toward the east and stretched away on a comparative level toward an immense white moon. Aquila's horse kept up with the matchless speed of the tall camel only at times, and Laodice, dully sensing that they were going at hot haste, realized that a race was on between them and the pestilence. Momus was wielding the goad for a run to the frosts.

A camel raced up beside Aquila.

"Look!" the woman said to him in a lowered tone, showing back over the road by which they had come. Aquila turned in his saddle and looked. Momus rose in his seat and looked. Behind them only one camel rocked along in their wake. The other and its driver had disappeared.

"Deserted!" Aquila exclaimed under his breath.

"Three!" the woman said.

"A pest on your counting for a Charon's toll-taker!" Aquila whispered savagely. "We will have no more of it!"

"No?" the woman said with a meaning that made the pagan shiver.

Momus laid goad about his camel.

The way continually ascended toward the east; the soil was no longer sandy, but rocky; no longer given up to desolate gardens, but black with groves of cedars and highland shrubs. They swung off a plateau that would have ended in a cliff, down a shaly sheep-path into a wady. Under the moonlight, the bottom was seen to be scarred with marks of hoof and wheel. It debouched suddenly into a Roman road, straight, level, magnificently built and running as a bird flies on to Jerusalem.

The camel's gait increased. Momus settled himself in a securer position and Laodice, careless of the outcome of this breathless hurry, yielded herself to the careen of her howdah. At times, her indifferent vision caught, through moonlit notches and gaps, glimpses of great blue vapors, crowned with pale fire and piled in glorious disorder low on the eastern horizon. They were the hills encompassing Jerusalem. The stream of wind on her face cooled and drove stronger.

Aquila rode closer to her, his horse panting under the effort. His face looked strange and distressed.

"Lady," he said in low tones, "necessity forces me to speak to you in your grief; do not blame me for indifference to your desire to be alone. But we must care for you, though in your heart this moment you may resent a wish to live. But your father commanded me!"

She gave him attention.

"Let us not carry peril with us," he added in a half-whisper. "Let us not carry food for pestilence with us."

"I do not understand," she answered, adopting his low tone.

"The more we are, the more of us to die. You must live; I must live," he explained, nodding toward Momus.

After a little silence, she asked:

"Do we not ride toward the frosts?"

"Yes; but even now pestilence may ride on beside us–your servant and this woman. Let us save ourselves."

"Abandon them?" she questioned.

"Lest they go on without us," he added.

Momus turned suddenly and gazed at Aquila. Then he imperiously signed the pagan to fall back.

They rode on.

The pagan slackened his horse's gallop and reined in beside the woman. They talked together, argumentatively, for a single tense minute and then Aquila, with a bitter word, put spurs to his animal and dashed up beside Laodice's camel. In his one uplifted hand a knife gleamed. The other reached toward the casket bound to Momus' hip. Laodice, raised to an upright attitude in her fresh fright, saw that his face was black and twisted and that he wavered stiffly in his saddle.

But the mute did not await the attack. He seized the pagan's outstretched hands with that monstrous left and flung him backward. Without an effort to save himself, falling rigidly and with a strange cry, Aquila dropped back over his horse's crupper into the dust of the road.

"Momus!" Laodice screamed.

Back of her the woman cried out:

"On! On! It is the pestilence!"

Momus wielded his goad. Laodice, shaking and crying aloud, looked back to see the strange woman swerve her camel past the dark shape lying with out-flung arms in the road and sweep quickly on after them.

The scourge had overtaken Aquila.

All night the camels fled east, all night the soft footfall of the woman's beast pursued them; all night the wind freshened until Laodice's bared face stiffened with the cold and the breath of the mute that sat upon her camel's neck steamed in the moonlight. Up and up, by steep and winding wadies they mounted; under overhanging cliffs and past bald towers of hill-rock staring white in the moon, along black passes between brooding eminences of solid night, crowned with ghost-light; over high plateaus darkened with groves, down dales with singing, invisible streams running seaward and up again and on until the hills engulfed them wholly and those before were higher than any they had seen. Then their flying beasts, leaving the Roman road over which they had sped for some distance, followed a sheep-path and burst into an open immersed in moonlight. Below in the distance was a cluster of huts, white and lifeless. But abroad, over the crisp grass and