“Where are they?” Rachel asked.
“Alas! they are in wretched, captive, plundered Rome,” Ethne said; “but pray on. The God of thy fathers, the Father of thy Christ and ours, is hearing still.”
Rachel insisted on Ethne’s coming into the cottage with the nurse and Dewi and the dog, and nothing could satisfy her till they had all partaken of her goat’s-milk cheeses, and the flat, Oriental loaves which she baked on the wood fire.
As they were eating, the soldierly husband came in from the fields, and then all their story unfolded itself.
There had been a rising of the people in the city in Asia Minor where Rachel was born, in consequence of some wild calumny about the massacre of a Christian child, and a Roman force had come to restore order. All the Jews in the place had been banished, and some of them had been sold into captivity. Among the captives, Rachel, then a child of twelve, had fallen to the share of a Roman centurion, a brave, simple man, whose mother was of Gothic race.
“He had compassion on me,” Rachel said; “he is the gentlest and bravest of men. He had a little sister about my age. He brought me home to his father’s house and lands among these hills. They were Christians, and welcomed me as one of the people of their Christ, and I also became a Christian, and was baptized. In a few years I became the wife of their son, my deliverer.”
Then Ethne told her all she knew of Miriam and Eleazar; and with the promise that Rachel would come to see her in her own home, she returned to Damaris and her little Paul.
