"SHE COULD NOT BE DECEIVED: IT WAS MERODACH!"
Watching with fond and eager eyes, she turned sick and faint, while she crouched down, like some poor hunted fawn, into her shelter; for on its back, soothing the good horse with many a gentle word and tender caress, sat the form of him whom most she feared and hated in the bounds of earth. Yes; the beautiful face she seemed yet to behold lulled on her own breast, in flushed and drunken sleep, was surely there, within a few paces, gazing dreamily into the distance; while Merodach, scarcely wetting his dark muzzle in the water, pawed and snorted in restless impatience to rejoin the companions he had left.
What was Ninyas doing here? Had the prince pursued her from Ascalon? was he on her track, and searching for her even now? could she escape him, neither in the city nor the plain? All these thoughts whirled through her brain, while she lay still as death, scarcely daring to breathe, peering at her enemy through a crevice of the crumbling wall with pale face and wild dilated eyes.
The horseman seemed moody and abstracted—strangely lavish of caresses for his steed, strangely indifferent to the heat of the sun, the ripple of the fountain, everything but his own engrossing thoughts. Without dismounting, he sat wrapped in meditation for a space of time that appeared interminable to the watcher, ere he woke up, as it were, with a start, and, curbing his beast's impatience, rode away at a walk to enter the city by a different gate from that which the party he had left were about to pass through.
Emerging from her shelter, though not until the white horse and his rider had disappeared in the distance, Ishtar felt sadly perplexed. To abide by her present hiding-place would be imprudent in the highest degree, for the Well of Palms was the resort of every traveller who approached Babylon on its southern side. If she retraced her steps, and fled once more into the wilderness, she must perish from thirst and fatigue; for to be afoot in the desert without a camel was to be adrift on the sea without a boat; and she had even abandoned the honest plodding beast that brought her thus far after she left her gigantic protector at sunrise. She almost wished now she had remained in their tents with the Anakim, intrusting to those tameless denizens of the waste her own safety and the task of eventually recovering her lover.
She saw no other course left but to trudge wearily on, and pass, if possible, unnoticed through the gate of Babylon, there to seek high and low some real friend, who, for her father's sake, would give her bread to eat, a roof to cover her, and aid in the one object of her life.
Wrapping her veil closely round her, counterfeiting as well as she could the gait and bearing of a woman advanced in years and of humble grade, Ishtar toiled slowly forward, carrying indeed a sorely laden heart into that glittering capital of splendour, luxury, and sin.