"Verily, a sending, but it is not for us. Abide here until I deliver it to him that expects it." He turned toward the ruined wall where Marsyas secluded himself. The pastor knocked on the dried earth wall without the cave, and the matting was thrust aside. The young Jew stood there. "I bring thee a message from without," the pastor said at once. "Peace and the love of Christ enter thy heart and uphold thee." He put the arrow into the young man's hand and saluting him with the sign of the cross, went his way. "What blind incaution," Marsyas said, after he had stared in astonishment at the things delivered him. "A message! How does he know that he does not bear to me treachery against his people, and his undoing!" But he sat down and undid the white case. "That is Agrippa's writing!" he declared after he had read it. He took up the other. The writing was in Sanskrit. "O white Brother:" it ran; "this by an arrow from the strong bow of thy lord Prince. Him I compelled. Come forth from among the Nazarenes! Deliver thyself, by nightfall, in the pure name of her whom thou lovest! Come ere that time, if thou canst, but fail not, otherwise, to be in the forefront of Flora's followers! Be prepared to possess her! "Fail not, by all the gods! "Vasti, by the hand of Khosru, priest to Siva." Marsyas seized the writing with both hands and sprang up; reread it with straining eyes; walked the two steps permitted him in his cave over and over again; or leaned against the earthen wall to think. In the pure name of her whom he loved! Lydia? He felt his Essenic self dissolve in a flood of glad confusion, for the moment; instead of self-reproach, he felt more joy than he ever hoped to know in a life devoted to vengeance; instead of guilt, an uplift that separated him for an instant from even his terror for the rapture of contemplating Lydia. Then the grave alarm that the bayadere's letter aroused possessed him. A rereading filled him with consternation. The unrevealed peril that he was to avert, the intimation that Lydia was endangered, the practically insurmountable obstacles in the way of his escape, shook him strongly in his self-control. He made no plans, for desperate conditions did not admit of formulated action. To pass outposts of half a cohort of brawny guards offered success only by a miracle, and the miraculous is not methodical. Presently, he burst out of his burrow and tramped through the bright hours of the afternoon, cursing the sun for its deadly haste to get under the rim of the world, and dizzy with the pressure of terror and anxiety.