"Nay! Do not show me, yet, that you are only bent on being queen!" he exclaimed.
"I care for nothing but the rescue of Judea!" she cried passionately. "There is nothing left to me but that!"
"Then your ambitions are still for me. Alas, that the Messiah has come and gone!"
It was his first reference to the great calamity he had told to her a short time before. Its recurrence after she had resolved to regard it as an impossible and blasphemous tale brought a chill to her heart.
"If I can prove to you that there is no hope for Jerusalem, what then?" he asked suddenly.
She flung off the question with a gesture.
"Answer me. What then?"
"It is unimaginable what shall come to pass when God deserts His own."
"No need for imaginings. Look at Jerusalem and observe the fact. And if we be abandoned, what fealty do we owe to a God that deserts us? If you believe or not you are lost. Let us go out and live."
"If God has deserted us," she said scornfully, "how shall we be happier elsewhere than here?"