In one of these fields they saw the two white oxen at their toil, and behind them the labourer, a tall man of about fifty years of age, bearded, and having a calm face and eyes that were very deep and quiet. He was clad in a rough robe of camel’s hair, fastened about his middle with a leathern girdle, and wore sandals on his feet. To him they went, asking leave to speak with him, whereon he halted the oxen and greeted them courteously, but, like the man in the village, turned his eyes away from the faces of the women. Nehushta bade the nurse stand back out of hearing, and, bearing the child in her arms, said: “Sir, tell me, I pray you, if I speak to Ithiel, a priest of high rank among this people of the Essenes, and brother to the dead lady Miriam, wife of Benoni the Jew, a merchant of Tyre?” At the mention of these names Ithiel’s face saddened, then grew calm again. “I am so called,” he answered; “and the lady Miriam is my sister, who now dwells in the happy and eternal country beyond the ocean with all the blessed”—for so the Essenes imagined that heaven to which they went when the soul was freed from the vile body. “The lady Miriam,” continued Nehushta, “had a daughter Rachel, whose servant I was.” “Was?” he interrupted, startled from his calm. “Has she then been put to death by those fierce men and their king, as was as her husband Demas?” “Nay, sir, but she died in childbirth, and this is the babe she bore”; and she held the sleeping little one towards him, at whom he gazed earnestly, yes, and bent down and kissed it—since, although they saw so few of them, the Essenes loved children. “Tell me that sad story,” he said. “Sir, I will both tell it and prove it to be true”; and Nehushta told him all from the beginning to the end, producing to his sight the tokens which she had taken from the breast of her mistress, and repeating her last message to him word for word. When she had finished, Ithiel turned away and mourned a while. Then, speaking aloud, he put up a prayer to God for guidance—for without prayer these people would not enter upon anything, however simple—and came back to Nehushta, who stood by the oxen. “Good and faithful woman,” he said, “who it would seem are not fickle and light-hearted, or worse, like the multitude of your sex—perchance because your dark skin shields you from their temptations—you have set me in a cleft stick, and there I am held fast. Know that the rule of my order is that we should have naught to do with females, young or old; therefore how can I receive you or the child?”