As he spoke the words, they heard a quick footstep behind, and were overtaken by Longinus, who, saying he had just heard of their reception, greeted them with every demonstration of rapturous affection. "Now," pursued he, walking by their side, "good for evil to Master Paulus's family. Forgive the apparent intrusion, dear general, if I mention that I happen to know the story of your youthful love, as all the world have witnessed your fidelity to an unavailing attachment. But learn from poor Longinus that Esther Maccabeus is now a disciple; and the Christian maiden can wed, under a still holier law, the brave Gentile whom the Jewess was bound to refuse." With this he turned into an alley under the court of the Gentiles, and disappeared. CHAPTER XXVI. One still and sultry evening, the decline of a brooding day in spring, two persons were sitting on the flat roof of a house in Jerusalem. They were the Athenian Lady Aglais and her son, the comparatively youthful Roman General Paulus--he who has so largely figured, even from his gallant boyhood, in the events and affairs we have been recording. It was the 30th of March, and a Wednesday--the first of all Easter-Wednesdays--the first in that new and perpetual calendar by which, throughout the fairest regions of earth, among all enlightened nations and civilized races, till the crash of doom, time was for evermore to be measured. A servant, carrying a skin-cask slung over his shoulders, was watering the flowers, faint with thirst; and these, arranged in fanciful vases, which made an artificial garden of the housetop, shook their drooping heads under the fresh and grateful shower, and seemed to answer it with smiles of a thousand blooms and rays. As the man stole softly to and fro about the roof, now approaching the lady and her son, now receding, he seemed, in spite of the foreign language in which they spoke, and in spite of the low and hushed tone they observed, to follow, with intense and breathless though stealthy excitement, the tenor of their conversation; while his figure, in the last evening rays, cast a long, shifting shadow that streaked with black the yellow flood to its farthest limit, climbed the parapet, broke upon its grail-work of balusters, and then was beheaded, for it flung off its head out of sight into empty space, leaving the calm bright air unblotted above the stone guard-wall.