"How is it with you, Laodice?" he asked, faltering a little.
"I am prepared, my father," she answered.
"I commend your despatch. I would be gone within an hour."
She bowed and Costobarus regarded her with growing wistfulness. At this last moment his love was to become his obstacle, his fear for his child his one cowardice.
"Dost thou remember him?" he asked without preliminary.
Laodice answered as if the thought were first in her mind.
"Not at all; and yet, if I could remember him, I may not discover in the man of four-and-twenty anything of the lad of ten."
"He may not have changed. There are such natures, and, as I recall him, his may well be one of these. His disposition from childhood to boyhood did not change. When I knew him in Jerusalem, he was worthy the notice of a man. The manner he had there he bore with him to this, a smaller city, and hence to Ephesus, a city of another kind. It was good to see him examine the world, reject this and that and look upon his choice proudly. He made the schools observe him, consider him. He did not enter them for alteration, nor was he shut up in a shell of self-satisfaction. He entered them as a citizen of the world and as an examiner of all philosophy. Yet the world taught him nothing. It gave him merely the open school where regulation and atmosphere helped him to teach himself. O wife of a child, thou shalt not be ashamed of thy husband, man-grown!"
"How is he favored?" she asked with the first maiden hesitation showing in the question.
"He was slender and dark and promised to be tall. He was quick in movement, quick in temper, resourceful, aye, even shifty, I should say; stubborn, cold in heart, hard to please."