The sun went down behind the rose-tinted mountains of Judea to the west. Their peaks gleamed in blood and fire above the red and golden sands. Bernice sat on an ivory bench in the gardens above the silver clouds lying on the Dead Sea below. In her hand was a bunch of snowy cyclamens, which she idly plucked. Before her stood the young presbyter, Onesimus, clad like his master in flowing white, with black sandal straps braided halfway to the knee, a sword hanging by a gold cord from his neck, his hair as gold as the cord but cut short to the neck after the Greek fashion, his deep blue eyes gazing at the Princess as he would read her soul. Onesimus had grown to powerful manhood in these seven years since he left Paul at Rome.
She sat silent, thinking, but what she thought, he could not follow. There was a fifing of insects from the dry grasses, that bordered the garden walks. As the sun set over the blue green lake and the orange hills beyond, the clamor of war from the cañon below dulled and fell like the subsiding waves of an angry sea. She turned her seal ring round and round, and drew it from her finger as if to pass it to him. She pressed it to her lips.
“Will this be amulet to keep you from all harm?” she mused.
The young presbyter trembled.
“My Unseen King will keep me from all harm,” he answered; “and I dare not wear it till we are united for His Kingdom.”
“Look,” she said, “the Evening Star—Isis. The dewdrops are her tears.”
“ ’Twas the Star brought the Wise Men of the East,” he answered, “and there shall be no more tears in His Kingdom.”
An awful loneliness and an awful loveliness seemed to envelop her fragile form.
The young presbyter drew towards her as if to wrest her from her Dead Sea hopes and take her to that Unseen Kingdom with violent hands.