Towering over him, the very picture of retribution, was the man he had left, apparently dead by his hand, by the roadside in the hills of Judea months and months before.
For an instant, Julian stood petrified. Over his lips came a faint, frozen whisper that Laodice heard–that was proof enough to her, the moment after.
"Philadelphus–Maccabaeus!"
When his outraged kinsman put out vengeful hands to seize him, the Maccabee grasped the air. Julian of Ephesus had vanished!
Among the rocks at the base of the cliff that sheltered Christian Pella from the rude winds of the Perean mountains, the procurator of the city, Philadelphus Maccabaeus, and his wife, Laodice, sat side by side in the morning sun. There was a path little wider than a man's hand wandering along below them toward a well in the hollow of the rocks. Along this way, in early morning, Joseph, the shepherd, was in the habit of driving his sheep to drink. And hither the procurator and his wife came to visit the boy from time to time. Within their hall, there was too much state. Something in the wild open of Judea with its winds gave them all an ease whenever they wished to talk with Joseph.
But the shepherd was not in sight. The pair sat down and waited for him.
Laodice rested against her husband's arm, laid along the rock behind her. Presently he freed that arm and with the ease of much usage withdrew the bodkins from her hair. The heavy coil dropped over his breast down to his knee. With delicate touches he began to free from the splendid tangle a single strand of glistening white hair. When she saw it shining like spun silver across the back of his hand, she looked up at him. With infinite care he searched her face, while she waited with questioning in her tender eyes.
"This," he said, lifting the hand that supported the silver threads, "is the sole evidence that thou hast seen the abomination of desolation."
"And that came the night I journeyed away from Jerusalem, without you," she declared. "But, my Philadelphus," she said, turning herself a little that she might hide her face away from him, "had I stayed with you against my conscience, I had been by this time wholly white."