"Then know that Dion, son of General Agathocles of Macedon, forswears the service of Antioch, and vows loyalty only to the cause of the Jewish people." Judas glanced at Deborah. "Is this the friend of the house of Elkiah? For thy sweet sake, daughter, it shall be as he wills." He grasped the hand of Dion. While this scene was transpiring at the western gate a very different one might have been witnessed at the south gate. The street within was packed with a motley multitude impeding one another's way in their eagerness to escape from the city. Men and women, rich and poor, young and old; some bruising the backs of their neighbors with the chests they carried upon their shoulders; others with their palanquins forcing the crowd asunder, commanding, entreating, shouting imprecations, and crying with hurts, choked the gateway. "Way! way for the High Priest!" sounded above the din. A giant Nubian with his gnarled arms threw the people to right and left and opened a passage for Menelaos and Lydia, whose blanched faces peered out from the purple curtains of their vehicle. Amid this scurrying crowd, amid tattered wealth and paupers bedizened with their stolen finery, went an exquisite carriage, in which, covered with the robes at the feet of Clarissa, the harlot dancer and poisoner of Antioch, crouched the form of Glaucon, son of Elkiah. Jonathan begged permission to dash upon the fugitives and make an end of them, even as his father had slain the renegade Jew at the gate of Modin. But Judas refused. "Let them depart. Let the wound of Israel slough off its foulness; it will the sooner heal." XL "A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM" When the overthrow of Gorgias became known in the city, many of the soldiers of Antiochus fled even more precipitately than did the traitorous Jews. The grim towers beat upon the fugitives with shadows like the wings of an avenging spirit, which, indeed, some declared they saw descend from the sky. A few companies under Meton's closer discipline kept within the Citadel. Even that Commandant's courage had been well shaken by the previous disaster to Seron, and his nerves permanently disordered by the tragedy of the General's suicide in his presence. The new discomfiture of the more famous Gorgias--a defeat so thorough that even that great soldier's genius seemed utterly paralyzed, so that he did not attempt a retaliatory blow--completed the demoralization of Meton, so that he gave no orders for the defence of the city at large, being fully content to keep his own skin unpunctured within the walls of his castle. Judas, having no artillery for assailing the fortifications which had withstood every assault since the days of Nebuchadnezzar, was equally content to let Meton be his own jailer.