“Bid me not depart, Adonijah, or at least not here, where gratitude reminds me of the mighty debt I owe you. It was here that you rebuked my blind idolatry, it was here you avowed your love. Yes, beloved Adonijah, you shook here my trust in the superstition to which I had been dedicated, and brought me from pagan darkness to the worship of the one true God. We are about to part—we who have prayed so often together—we who have vowed eternal love, hopeless though that love may be. Yes, we must part—but not unkindly, not in anger. Take these scrolls, my brother, and keep them in remembrance of me. They contain the evidences of that faith of which the ceremonial law of Moses was but the type and shadow. Read them, and compare them with the Scriptures, and see if it be not so. Then Adonijah the Christian may claim his Christian bride.” Lucia Claudia blushed deeply, and, extending the delicate hand that held the holy Gospel, timidly, yet beseechingly, regarded Adonijah. How beautiful was that tenderness, how frank and yet how chastened by modest dignity was that avowal! Adonijah was almost more than man to resist it. “Tempt me not, Lucia,” he replied, “to my undoing; the bribe is mighty, but I am strong in faith. Well is it for thee that thou art no daughter of my people, for then in obedience to a tremendous law my hand must be first upon thee to cast the murderous stone, though thou wert the wife of my own bosom, or the friend dearer than my own soul.” He repulsed the hand she proffered, and, snatching the vellum scrolls Lucia Claudia held towards him, trampled them scornfully beneath his feet. “Cruel Adonijah, and is it thus we part? Oh, I had hoped that the preaching of the word would have melted away these proud and stubborn thoughts. Why have you frequented our midnight assemblies, why has your shadow haunted me, unless it were to pass between me and my God?” Adonijah laughed bitterly; that scornful laugh thrilled painfully from the ears of Lucia to her heart. Could he betray her—could his stern integrity stoop to a measure so infinitely base and unworthy of him? Oh no! woman’s trusting love forbade a thought so wild. “Adonijah,” said she, “you were kinder to the priestess of Vesta than to the worshipper of the true God.” “Oh that you were still the idolatress—the heathen priestess—or anything but an apostate from Jehovah! Go, leave me, guileful Gentile; leave me in solitude and misery to curse the day when first a true Israelite gazed on your fatal form, and, all-forgetful of his creed, madly doted upon the daughter of the stranger.” With these words Adonijah quitted the presence of the distressed and weeping Lucia Claudia. CHAPTER XIII. “No place could be better calculated to answer all the purposes of the primitive and persecuted Christians, than the subterraneous caverns of the Arenaria.”