ill serve to
expose him, his habits, motives, life. Understand you? Go quickly!
Stay, Malluch: if he leave the city, go after him--and, mark you,
Malluch, be as a friend. If he bespeak you, tell him what you will
to the occasion most suited, except that you are in my service,
of that, not a word. Haste--make haste!"

The man saluted as before, and was gone.

Then Simonides rubbed his wan hands together, and laughed.

"What is the day, daughter?" he said, in the midst of the mood.
"What is the day? I wish to remember it for happiness come.
See, and look for it laughing, and laughing tell me, Esther."

The merriment seemed unnatural to her; and, as if to entreat him
from it, she answered, sorrowfully, "Woe's me, father, that I
should ever forget this day!"

His hands fell down the instant, and his chin, dropping upon his
breast, lost itself in the muffling folds of flesh composing his
lower face.

"True, most true, my daughter!" he said, without looking up. "This
is the twentieth day of the fourth month. To-day, five years ago,
my Rachel, thy mother, fell down and died. They brought me home
broken as thou seest me, and we found her dead of grief. Oh, to
me she was a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-Gedi! I
have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb
with my honey. We laid her away in a lonely place--in a tomb cut
in the mountain; no one near her. Yet in the darkness she left me
a little light, which the years have increased to a brightness of
morning." He raised his hand and rested it upon his daughter's head.
"Dear Lord, I thank thee that now in my Esther my lost Rachel liveth
again!"

Directly he lifted his head, and said, as with a sudden thought,
"Is it not clear day outside?"

"It was, when the young man came in."

"Then let Abimelech come and take me to the garden, where I can
see the river and the ships, and I will tell thee, dear Esther,
why but now my mouth filled with laughter, and my tongue with
singing, and my spirit was like to a roe or to a young hart upon
the mountains of spices."

In answer to the bell a servant came, and at her bidding pushed
the chair, set on little wheels for the purpose, out of the room to
the roof of the lower house, called by him his garden. Out through
the roses, and by beds of lesser flowers, all triumphs of careful
attendance, but now unnoticed, he was rolled to a position from
which he could view the palace-tops over against him on the