air. So dreadful they were in their
unseeing look that every man asked himself what would happen if that
gaze should light upon him. He stood a moment, walked as soft-footed
and as swiftly as some shade through our burrow and vanished as he had
come. In all the time he tarried, he made not one sound!"

Laodice was looking at him with awed, but understanding eyes.

"It was Seraiah," she said in a low voice. "He entered this place on a
day last week. All the city is afraid of him."

"So my soldiers told me afterward, between chattering teeth. He almost
damped our patriotism. We uttered our bombast, sealed our vows and
made our sorties, thereafter, every man of us, with our chins over our
shoulders! Spare me Seraiah! He has too much influence!"

"Is he a madman?" she asked.

"Or else a supernatural man. Would I could manage men by the fall of
my foot, as he does. I should have Jerusalem's fealty by to-morrow
night. But it was near early morning that the other incident occurred.
That was of another nature. We stumbled upon a pair huddled in the
shadow of a building. We stumbled upon many figures in shadows, but
one of these murmured a name that I heard once in the hills hereabout,
and I had profited by that name, so I halted. It was an old man,
starved and weary and ill; with him was a gray ghost of a creature
with long white hair, that seemed to be struck with terror the instant
it heard my voice. At first I thought it was a withered old woman, but
it proved to be a man--somehow seeming young in spite of the
snow-white hair and wasted frame. I had them taken up, the gray ghost
resisting mightily, and carried to my burrow where they now lie. They
eat; they take up space; they add nothing to my cause. But I can not
turn them out. The old man disarms me by that name."

He looked down at her with softening eyes.

"And the shepherd held thy hand?" he said softly. She turned upon him
in astonishment. How much of joy and surprise and hope he could bring
in a single visit, she thought. Now, behold he had met that same
delightsome child that had passed like a dash of sunlight across her
dark day.

"Did you meet the shepherd of Pella?" she asked. Instant deduction
supplied her the name that had moved him to compassion. "And did he
serve you in the name of his Prophet?" she whispered.

"He saved my life in the name of his Christ, but was tender of me in
thy name," he replied.

"His is a sweet apostasy," she ventured brave