At first it seemed as if what he had done did not make his way plainer before him. But as he stood by the prostrate man a thought occurred to him. He took the purse which the man, in the usual traveller’s fashion, wore by way of girdle round his waist, and examined its contents. It held three gold pieces and some ten shekels. The gold he left; but half of the shekels he transferred to his own keeping. One of the shekels sufficed to purchase some bread and dried flesh at the neighbouring village. Thus recruited in strength the fugitive made his escape to the mountains. CHAPTER IX. THE PERSECUTION. Menander, or Micah—the young man still wavered between the two moods which were symbolized by these names—had been greatly moved, as we have said, by what he had seen and heard in his visit to his sister and her husband. But he could not shake himself free from the habits and prepossessions of years. Though he had always kept aloof from the worst excesses of his renegade and heathen friends, still his moral tone had been lowered, and even his physical nerve weakened by a frivolous and self-indulgent life. Sometimes he would half resolve to cast in his lot with his people. Sometimes, again, the cynical or doubting temper returned. What madness it would be, so the evil voice whispered to him, to sacrifice all that made life pleasant, and, very possibly, life itself, for what both philosophers and practical men of the world agreed in pronouncing to be a delusion! Till this question had been settled one way or the other, he found it impossible to rest. The city became odious to him, for he shrank from the sight of his fellow-men. Indeed, he did not know with whom to associate. His Greek or Greek-loving acquaintances, with their frivolities and vices, disgusted him; and the patriots regarded him with coldness and aversion. Solitude, he fancied, might suit him better, and he went again to his country house at Lebanon. But he found himself worse off than ever where there was nothing to come between his thoughts and himself, and he hastened back to Jerusalem. Then it suddenly occurred to him that his sister had been expecting shortly to become a mother, and he made his way to her house to inquire of her welfare. Azariah himself answered his knock. “How is Hannah?” “Thanks be to the Lord,” replied Azariah, “she is well. She had an easy travail.” “And the babe? A son or a daughter?” “The Lord has given us a son.” But he said it without the gladness that a Jewish father, newly blessed with the hope that there should be one to preserve his name in Israel, should have felt. “But you must come in and see him, for indeed he is of a singular beauty.”