Another day Ethne resolved to visit once more the farm among the hills, where she had seen the ruddy, happy children, the free, frank, soldierly man with the graceful, dark-eyed young wife, whose face seemed to her familiar, as a strain of music heard long ago. She found the young mother drawing water with a pitcher from the well near the house, her children laughing around her, and helping her to pour the water into a trough for the sheep which were clustering near. Her dark eyes brightened in kindly recognition, and all at once the likeness in her face flashed upon Ethne. “Rachel!” she exclaimed, “Rachel at the well!” “Rachel is my name,” the stranger said; “but how couldst thou know me?” “I did not know thee,” Ethne said, “but I knew thy mother, Miriam, the wife of Eleazar.” The young mother laid her pitcher on the brim of the well, and knelt down by its side, and clasping her hands in adoration, she looked up to heaven. “God of our fathers—Father of our Christ,” she said, “Thou hast heard me at last.” “He has heard thee all the time,” said Ethne, “thee, and thy father and mother, who have sought thee from land to land, and prayed for thee day and night.” “Where are they?” Rachel asked. “Alas! they are in wretched, captive, plundered Rome,” Ethne said; “but pray on. The God of thy fathers, the Father of thy Christ and ours, is hearing still.” Rachel insisted on Ethne’s coming into the cottage with the nurse and Dewi and the dog, and nothing could satisfy her till they had all partaken of her goat’s-milk cheeses, and the flat, Oriental loaves which she baked on the wood fire. As they were eating, the soldierly husband came in from the fields, and then all their story unfolded itself. There had been a rising of the people in the city in Asia Minor where Rachel was born, in consequence of some wild calumny about the massacre of a Christian child, and a Roman force had come to restore order. All the Jews in the place had been banished, and some of them had been sold into captivity. Among the captives, Rachel, then a child of twelve, had fallen to the share of a Roman centurion, a brave, simple man, whose mother was of Gothic race. “He had compassion on me,” Rachel said; “he is the gentlest and bravest of men. He had a little sister about my age. He brought me home to his father’s house and lands among these hills. They were Christians, and welcomed me as one of the people of their Christ, and I also became a Christian, and was baptized. In a few years I became the wife of their son, my deliverer.” Then Ethne told her all she knew of Miriam and Eleazar; and with the promise that Rachel would come to see her in her own home, she returned to Damaris and her little Paul. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER XXVIII. A TREASURE LOST AND A SOUL FOUND. A joyful meeting awaited Ethne on her return. Marius himself came to greet her, with their little Paul in his arms.