sman at her side, the others in her train, she ascended the
little hill on which her castle was, and where the midday meal awaited.

It was a charming residence. Built quadrangularwise, the court held a
fountain which was serviceable to those that wished to bathe. The roof was
a garden. The interior facade was of teak wood, carved and colored; the
frontal was of stone. Seen from the exterior it looked the fortress of
some umbrageous prince, but in the courtyard reigned the seduction of a
woman in love. From without it menaced, within it soothed.

Her title to it was a matter of doubt. According to Pandera, who at the
mess-table at Tiberias had boasted his possession of her confidence, it
was a heritage from her father. Others declared that it had been given her
by her earliest lover, an old man who since had passed away. Yet, after
all, no one cared. She kept open house; the tetrarch held her in high
esteem; she was attached to the person of the tetrarch's wife; only a
little before, the emir of Tadmor had made a circuitous journey to visit
her; Vitellius, the governor of the province, had stopped time and again
beneath her roof; and--and here was the point--to see her was to acquire a
new conception of beauty. Of human flowers she was the most fair.

Yet now, during the meal that followed, Mary, the toast of the tetrarchy,
she whose wit and brilliance had been echoed even in Rome, wrapped herself
in a mantle of silence. The guardsman jested in vain. To the others she
paid as much attention as the sun does to a torch; and when at last
Pandera, annoyed, perhaps, at her disregard of a quip of his, attempted to
whisper in her ear, she left the room.

The nausea of the hour may have affected her, for presently, as she threw
herself on her great couch, her thoughts forsook the present and went back
into the past, her childhood returned, and faces that she had loved
reappeared and smiled. Her father, for instance, Theudas, who had been
satrap of Syria, and her mother, Eucharia, a descendant of former kings.

But of these her memories were slight--they had died when she was still
very young--and in their place came her sister, Martha, kind of heart and
quick of temper, obdurate, indulgent, and continually perplexed; Simon,
Martha's husband, a Libyan, born in Cyrene, called by many the Leper
because of a former whiteness of his skin, a whiteness which had long
since vanished, for he was brown as a date; Eleazer, her brother,