She turned and ran up the staircase, her frenzy of grief giving her a strength so great that armed men could scarcely have had the power to stay her. With a quick tread she entered the upper chamber. It was dark, yet not quite dark: the light of the stars seen through the open lattice sufficed to make the nearer objects faintly visible. Miriam lay in the middle of the apartment asleep upon her pallet. It was not to her that Vashti first turned. Though knowing well that she would not find him there, she nevertheless ran at once to Arad’s pallet. It was empty! She flew to her mother’s side, knelt, and peered shudderingly into the somnolent face, a face that wore at this moment the dull heavy air as of one whose animal wants are satisfied. Her mother actually _sleeping_, as if this were merely some ordinary night! sleeping, after such a deed as hers! Sleeping--she who ought never to sleep again! There was little of the daughter left in Vashti as she fiercely shook the slumbering woman by the shoulder. And the soul of the unhappy Miriam starting from blissful dreams to the dread reality of earthly things awoke to hear sounding through the gloom of night a voice that, like the voice of the accusing archangel, addressed her with the awful question: “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH ARAD?” CHAPTER XXII THE RESCUE OF VASHTI Tiberius Alexander, the apostate Jew, and Crispus, with four legionaries attending on them, stood at the foot of the city wall at the point where masonry, carried aloft to an amazing height, supported the Colonnade of Solomon. The night, bright and starry in its earlier part, had now become clouded and dark, an event that seemed to give satisfaction to Alexander. “The darker the night, the more likely am I to discover something,” he observed, from which remark it was clear to Crispus that Alexander had some special reason for bringing him to this spot, a spot that was a sore trial to the olfactory sense, owing to the effluvium arising from the dead bodies in the ravine of Cedron. Into that ravine Alexander was now gazing. He could quote the Hebrew prophets on occasion; usually, however, to ridicule them. “‘Son of man,’” said he mockingly to Crispus, “‘can these dry bones live?’” “My answer is that of the scribes whose teaching you have deserted,” retorted Crispus. “That which was not, came into being; how much more, then, that which has been already?” Tiberius Alexander might perhaps have replied to this celebrated, rabbinical argument but that his attention was attracted at that moment by the sudden appearance of a light at a window in one of the castella or forts on the Roman line of contravallation. Three times did the light flash, and then it vanished.