Costobarus glanced from one to the other of his company and then went toward the corridor to call his daughter. As he lifted the curtain, he started and stopped. [Illustration: At her feet Hannah knelt.] The lifted curtain had revealed Laodice. At her feet Hannah knelt, as if she had flung herself in her daughter's path, her arms clasping the young figure close to her and an agony of appeal stamped on her upraised face. The last of the rich color had died out of the girl's face and with pitiful eyes and quivering lips she was stroking the desperate hands that meant to keep her for ever. Except for the sudden sobbing of the woman servant, tense and anguished silence prevailed. The old merchant was confronted with a perplexity that found him without fortitude to solve. He felt his strength slip from him. He, too, covered his face with his hands. At the opposite arch another house servant appeared, lifted a distorted, blackening face and, doubling like a wounded snake, fell upon the floor. A moment of stupefied silence in which Hannah, with her mother instincts never so acutely alive, turned her strained vision upon the writhing figure. Then shrieks broke from the lips of the serving-woman; the hall filled with panic. Hannah leaped to her feet and thrust Laodice toward her father. "Away!" she cried. "The pestilence! The pestilence is upon us!" Chapter II ON THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM News of the appearance of the plague in the house of Costobarus traveled fast after the death of the gardener, who had fallen in the open and in sight of the watchful inhabitants of Ascalon. So by the time the house servants of the merchant were made aware of their peril by the death of one of their own number, Philip of Tyre with the courage of affection and loyalty stood on the threshold of the guest-chamber informed of the situation and prepared to help. Hannah, supported by the Tyrian's assurance of her rescue and protection, succeeded in urging Costobarus and Laodice not to delay for her to the peril of the thrice precious daughter. So with his house yet ringing with the first convulsion of terror Costobarus ordered his party with all haste to the camels. Keturah, Laodice's handmaiden, had fainted with terror and was carried parcel-wise over the great arm of Momus, the mute, out into the street and deposited summarily on the floor of Laodice's bamboo howdah. The camel-driver, Hiram, seemed only a little less stupefied than she. The mute, with a face as determined and threatening as an uplifted gad, drove him from the shelter of a dark corner out to his place on the neck of his master's camel. Aquila, the emissary, showed the immemorial composure in the face of disaster that was the badge of the Roman in the days of the degenerate Cæsars, and, mounting his horse when the rest of the party were in their places, headed the procession toward the northeast.