Amaryllis looked after him.
"And no farewell?" she said.
The thunder of assault began at her door. Juventius sang it down. The athlete and the girl crept toward the mouth of the black passage, wavered a moment and plunged in. After them tumbled a confusion of artists and servants who were swallowed up, and the hall was filled only with music.
The woman by the lectern and the singer on the rostrum had chosen. To live without beauty and to live without love were not possible to the one who had known beauty all his life, to the one who had learned love so late–after she had been beggared of her dowry of purity.
There was hardly an appreciable interval between the time of the desertion of her artists and the thunder of assault at her door, but in that space there passed before Amaryllis that useless retrospect which is death's recapitulation of the life it means to take. And out of that long procession, she singled one conviction which made the step of the Roman on her threshold welcome. It was an old, old moral, so old that it had never had weight with her, who believed it was time to reconstruct the whole artistic attitude of the world.
And that was why she waited impatiently at her doorway for death, which was a kinder thing than life.
Chapter XXIV
THE ROAD TO PELLA
There was no incident in the Maccabee's long struggle through the inky blackness of the tunnel leading under Moriah.
It was night when the first new air from the outside world reached him. So he rushed into great open darkness, lighted with stars, before he knew that he had emerged from the underground passage.