"Not yet," he answered, smiling. "It is my duty as a Jew to help you while there is time."
She settled back in her chair and looked at the cluster of plants while he talked.
"Nothing so damages the beauty of a woman as trickery. No bad woman is beautiful very long. There comes a canker on her soul's beauty, in her face, that disfigures her, soon or late. Whoever you are, whatever your condition, you are lovely yet. Be beautiful; of a surety then you must be good."
It was the same old hypocritical pose that the bad man assumes to cloak himself before innocence. Laodice remembered the incident in the hills.
"Where," she asked coldly, "is he who was with you at Emmaus?"
The pretender started a little, but the increase of alarm on his face showed that he realized next that here was a peril in this woman which he had overlooked.
"Gone," he said unreadily, "gone back to Ephesus."
She did not know what pain this announcement of that winsome stranger's desertion would waken in her heart. Her eyes fell; her brows lifted a little; the corners of her mouth became pathetic. The pretender, casting a sidelong glance at her, saw to his own safety that she had believed him.
"He was a parasite," he sighed, "living off my bounty. But even that did not invite him when he neared the peril of this city. So he turned back. I–I do not blame him," he added with a little laugh.
"Blame him?" she said quickly. "You–you do not blame him?"