As they stood thus, perplexed and alarmed, Vasti appeared like a shadow out of the dusk and caught the alabarch's arm.
"It is come!" she hissed with compelling vehemence. "To the Synagogue! Fly! For the hosts of Siva are upon you even now!"
Lysimachus grasped the grill of the window, and turned slowly toward his daughter.
"Lydia?" he asked helplessly.
The girl came to him, and Vasti began to motion her toward the street.
"What is it? What passeth?" the alabarch insisted, unable to act without perfect conception of the conditions he had to fight.
Lydia's eyes, fixed on her father's face, deepened with misery and widened with suffering. The hour had fallen! She was to be the outcast and the abomination at last.
"They accuse me," she said, "of being a Nazarene; that I committed sacrilege, to hold off the mob from Rhacotis—that I was the Dancing Flora!"
The alabarch put his thin hands to his forehead, as if to ward off the conviction, which all the fragmentary intimation against Lydia, and her own words conjoined, threatened to establish in him.
"Is it so, my daughter?" he asked in a benumbed voice.