“Is all this a delusion?” he asked himself. “Six months ago, perhaps even six hours ago, I should have had little doubt in saying so. But now—well, if it is a delusion, it is strangely like a reality. Anyhow its effects are real enough. Dear Hannah! always the best and kindest of sisters, but a timid creature, whom I used to amuse myself by frightening. But now—she is as bold as a lioness. Well, I can only hope that the truths which I have been learning, if they are truths, will stand me in as good stead when the need comes.” CHAPTER VII. THE DARKNESS THICKENS. Azariah had read the signs of the times aright. The darker days had come, days so full of trouble that the unhappy people looked back to the past that had seemed so sad and gloomy as to a time of rest. Things had not been going well with King Antiochus, for the Romans had driven him out of Egypt, and in his rage and fear he turned against his Jewish subjects with greater ferocity than ever. One of his motives was the brutal desire to wreak upon the feeble the vengeance which he could not exact from the strong; the other was a genuine fear lest he should lose another province as he had already lost Egypt. He saw that the policy of Rome was to stir up against him the national spirit of subject peoples, and he knew well enough that in the Jews, crushed though they had been by oppression and massacre, this national spirit was not by any means dead. Accordingly he set himself with relentless ferocity to extinguish it. Everything distinctive of the people was to be rooted out; that done they might become really submissive; there would be no more a land of the Jews, but simply a province of Southern Syria. The first thing, he conceived, would be to strike such terror into the hearts of the people that there should be no thought among them of resistance. For such a purpose nothing could be more effective than another massacre such as that which had already been perpetrated two years before under his own eyes: only this, he determined, should be more complete. He perceived with a devilish ingenuity that his orders would be more relentlessly carried out if he entrusted their execution to some one else, than if he were personally present. Appeals might be made to him to which he might yield out of sheer weariness, whereas a lieutenant, if he were only hard-hearted enough, would simply fall back upon the orders which he had received, and refuse all responsibility save that of seeing that these were fully carried out. Such a lieutenant he knew that he possessed in the person of a certain Apollonius, a Cretan mercenary, who had already given proofs enough that he was about as little troubled as any man could be with a conscience or with feelings of compassion. To Apollonius, accordingly, the commission was entrusted, and he proceeded to execute it in a particularly brutal and treacherous way.