"Hist! I tell it under my breath, because the noble proconsul is burdened with the great responsibility of declaring the emperor's deathlessness, and I would not contradict him aloud. But Tiberius is old, old--and Rome casts about for his successor. But chance hath it that interest hath uncoupled the two eyes so that the singleness of sight is divided. 'Look right,' saith one; 'look left,' saith the other, and each looking his own way reviles his fellow and creates disturbance in the head. But it behooves thee, gentle Jew, to bid thine eyes contemplate Tiberius, to do oriental obeisance and say as the Persians say; 'O King, live for ever!" "But yesterday, thou didst cast a kindly light over the world's hardness. Tear it not away thus soon and frighten me with the fierce power against which I must shortly go and demand tribute," he protested lightly. She took down her arms, clasped back of her head, to look at him. "Light-hearted eremite!" she chid. "Never a Jew but believed that all the happenings in the world happen in Jerusalem--that there is nothing else to come to pass after Jerusalem's full catalogue of possibilities is exhausted. But I tell thee that, compared to Rome, Jerusalem is an unwatered spot in the desert where once in a century a loping jackal passes by to break its eventlessness." "Lady," he said with his old gravity, "Judea is a Roman province. Is Rome harsher to her citizens than she is with her subjugated peoples?" "Thou art nearer the executive seat; under the eye of Power itself. Icarus, on his waxen wings, was unsafe enough in the daylight; but he was undone by soaring too close to the sun!" "What shall I do, then?" he asked. "Attach thyself to a power; get behind the buckler of another's strength!" "Power is not offering its protection for nothing; what have I to give in exchange for it?" Almost inadvertently, she let her eyes run over him, and seemed impelled to say the words that leaped to her lips. But she recovered herself in time. "It is a generous world," she said, "and such as thou shall not go friendless; depend upon it!" When Marsyas glanced up, his eyes rested on Lydia's, and for a moment he was held in silence by the faint darkening of distress that he saw there. Something wild and sweet and painful struggled in his breast and fell quiet so quickly that he sat with his lips parted and his gaze fixed until the alabarch's daughter dropped her eyes. "I heard thee speak of Rome," she said. "After thy labor is done, wilt thou remain there?" "No," he answered slowly, "I return to En-Gadi." "En-Gadi," Junia repeated. "Where is that and why shouldst thou go there?" "It is the city of the Essenes, a city of retreat. It is in the Judean desert on the margin of the Dead Sea." "After Rome, that!" Junia cried. But Lydia said nothing and Marsyas, gazing at her in hope of discovering some little deprecation, some little invitation to remain in the world, forgot that the Roman woman had spoken.