"I am merely perverse," he said darkly; "I knew it would be so much pleasure to my murderer to know that I died, duly."
The shepherd repressed his curiosity, as the best thing for his patient's welfare, and suggested another subject rather disjointedly.
"I have been thinking," he said, "about Jerusalem. I was there once upon a time."
"Once!" the Maccabee said. "You are old enough to attend the Passover."
"But our people do not attend the feast. We are Christians."
The Maccabee moved so that he could look at the boy. He might have known it, he exclaimed to himself. It was just such an extreme act of mercy, this assuming the care of a stranger in a wilderness, as he had ever known Christians to do in that city of irrational faiths, Ephesus.
"Well?" he said, hoping the boy would go on and spare him an expression on that announcement.
"I can not forget Jerusalem."
"No one forgets Jerusalem–except one that falls in love by the wayside," the man said.
Again the boy detected a ring of unexplained melancholy in his patient's voice, and talked on as a preventive.