Cause was submerged in effect; she felt less fear of the confession than of her father's suffering. In the appreciable interval his figure shriveled; age and the encroachment of death showed upon him. The atmosphere of the magistrate, the courtier and the aristocrat dissolved under the anguish of a father and the horror of a Jew. He had surrendered his two sons, Tiberius and Marcus, to paganism; in Lydia, he had reposed the unwatchful faith, that had permitted his other children to apostasize under his roof. He had believed the more in her, and the shock was the greater, therefore.
"Let it be the measure of my conviction, my father," she said sadly, "that I did this thing in the knowledge that I might forfeit thy love!"
He made no movement; his face did not relax from its stunned agony. Lydia awaited its change with flagging heart-beat.
But the thunder of menace from the Gymnasium square rolled in again through the streets of the Regio Judæorum. The alabarch heard it. Up through the mask there struggled not rebuke and condemnation, but the terror of love fearing for its own. He caught Lydia in his arms and turned his straining eyes toward the windows. But the bayadere waited no longer for the arousing of his faculties. She seized his arm and thrust him toward the vestibule.
"Awake! Get you up and be gone! Will you wait to see her perish?"
She did not stop until she had pushed them through the porch into the streets.
"To the Synagogue!" she commanded last, and disappeared as she had come.
All the Regio Judæorum, as far as the Brucheum on the south and the tumble and wash of the Mediterranean on the north, was pouring through the streets toward the New Port.
The alabarch's own servants went hither and thither, knocking at doors, from which other servants presently issued to speed with the alarm over the yet unwarned sections nearer the Synagogue.
After a moment's waiting until the light airs cleared the daze that enmeshed his brain, the alabarch took Lydia under his cloak and fled with his people toward their refuge.