She dismissed this consideration; for, momentous as was the destiny it involved, there was something else that appealed more urgently for decision. She was a woman. To her a throne seemed but a passing circumstance. There was a deeper issue. "Love is the abiding thing. Can I be--the wife of Judas? Could this man, noble as he is, possess my life, my soul? Is admiration, or even reverence and self-sacrificing devotion--is this love? Or does the soul have depths as well as heights; and does worshipful regard dwell on the heights, and love in the depths, so that they may be utterly remote from each other, indeed, antagonistic? Dion is not comparable with Judas. Judas is on the heights; nothing higher, save God Himself. But Dion--he has his place, too; but where?" She now remembered that the beginning of Gideon ben Sirach's story, which had so nearly made a Jew of the Greek, started in her a glow of happiness, and that she had felt a strange disappointment at its conclusion, which still left him a Greek. What did this experience mean? Did she really love this alien? As one of foreign blood he could never come into her life. The laws of her people, especially as interpreted by the Jewish purists, would forbid such a thing as marriage with him. She had been taught this doctrine by her father. It was one of the underlying occasions of the war. The Maccabæans regarded pure blood as next to the purity of worship. So she said, "Dion cannot come into my life." Then, having settled the matter so far, she thought of Judas: "What other woman of Israel would presume to decline such a proposal? And who am I to set an example of conceit? "The Queen of Israel!" Deborah felt the flush of womanly pride mantle her face. It was a moment when almost any other woman would have turned first to her mirror, and then dropped upon her knees to thank God. But even as she framed the image of the popular hero within the thought of her personal possession of him, the figure of the Greek intruded itself into the picture. His image was in the background, it is true; but there it was, nevertheless. She could not help following him with the eyes of her fancy. Was not Dion's soul as fine-fibred as that of Judas? Judas had sublime faith; but this he had inherited from his fathers. It was wrought through and through his nature by training in the Law since childhood. But Dion now had the same faith. And this he had himself acquired, without gift of birth, education, or circumstance. Is it not even nobler to force one's mind through a thousand errors to the truth than to have the truth born in one, to discover one's pearl after delving the seas for it, than to find it in one's ancestral treasure-box? Judas had risked his life for the cause of Israel. But had not Dion done as much in abandoning what seemed to him all the good of life in order to cast in his lot with the people of God?