Laodice was, by this time, stunned and intensely repelled. The hand on which Amaryllis had laid hers in passing tingled under the touch. Unconsciously she shook off the sensation of contact. The whole clear white interior of the hall became instantly unclean. Her standards of right and wrong were shaken; the wholesale assaults on her ideals left her shocked and unconfident. She felt the panic that all innocent women feel when suddenly aroused to the unfitness of their surroundings.
When she turned to hurry to her room, a flood of scarlet rushed into her cheeks and she shrank back, shaken with surprise and delight.
Before her stood a man, pale and thin, with his eyes upon her.
Chapter XII
THE PRINCE RETURNS
Joseph, the shepherd, son of Thomas of Pella, moved out of the green marsh before sunset, as he had planned to do, but not for the original motive. The sheep, indeed, would not have flourished in that dampness, rich as it was in young grass, but, more than that, there was no shelter for the wounded man who lay by the roadside.
The shepherd, who knew the hills of Judea as far as the Plain of Esdraelon as well as he knew the stony streets of the Christian city, located the nearest roof as one which a fagot-maker had occupied two years before. It was some distance up in the hills to the west. Since the scourge of war had passed over Palestine, there were scores of such hovels, vacant and abandoned to the bats and the small wild life about the countryside, and the boy doubted seriously if the thatch that covered it were still whole. But he attracted the attention of a pair of robust young Galileans on the way to the Passover, and, by their help, carried the wounded man to shelter in this hut. Urge, the sheep-dog, rushed the sheep out of the sedge and hurried them after his master, and in an hour Joseph was once more settled, his sheep were once more nosing over the rocky slants of a hill, his dog once more flat on his belly, watching. But it was a different day, after all.
The hut of the fagot-maker was the four walls and a roof and the earth that floored it, but it was wealth because it was shelter. It had two doors which were merely openings in the sides and between them lay the man on sheep-pelts with a cotton abas, which one of the Galileans had left, over him. At one of these doors, sitting sidewise, so that he could watch in or out, sat Joseph.
All night the man on the sheepskins spoke to the blackened thatch above him of the siege of Jerusalem and the treachery of Julian of Ephesus. He read letters from Costobarus and instructed Aquila over and over again. Then he tossed a coin and spent hours counting the hairs in the long locks that fell from the shining head of the moon down upon his breast, at midnight.
At times the boy, with the exquisite beauty of sleep on his heavy lids, would creep over from his vigil at the door and lay his cool hand on the sick man's forehead. And the sick man would speak in a low controlled voice, saying: