The chief apparitor looked unflinching into the proconsul's gray-brown eyes. "I hear," he said. The proconsul waved his hand and the soldier withdrew. CHAPTER XI THE HOUSE OF DEFENSE Meanwhile Marsyas lay on his straw pallet at the house of Peter, the usurer, in Ptolemais, night after night and made calculation. By fair winds, Agrippa should reach Alexandria in so many days. Allowing time to begin and complete the negotiations for a loan, so many more days should elapse. Then the same number with a few allowed for foul weather would be required to return to Ptolemais. About such a day, so many weeks hence, he told himself he should be ransomed. Six weeks is a long time for a free man to be enslaved. He sighed and turned again on his pallet and trusted in the God who does not forget prayers. It was a strange, sordid biding of time for Marsyas. The man he served was the first of the kind he had ever known. The ascetic refinement of the white old Essene, the simple purity of Stephen, the polished rigor of the Pharisee Saul, the naive sophistication of the Romanized Herod had constituted his social horizon, and he had come to believe that the world's manner was either cultured or simple. But he went into the usurer's counting-room to meet the borrowing world, to be amazed and shocked and finally to fortify himself to control it. It was not to change his nature; it was to develop latent powers in him that were the fruit of long generations of Judaism. At night his fingers were soiled by contact with the coins, the counting-room had become noisome with the day's heat and the unhappy humanity that had come and gone through the busy hours. But he summed up, not what he had sacrificed in soul-sweetness and optimism, for that was a loss he did not realize, but his triumphs in achieving whatever he had been bidden to do, in his mastery of men and things and in the thoroughness of his workmanship. However loudly his mind declared that he was out of place, he felt no great repugnance to his duty. After the newness of his experience wore off, as it did in a very short time, the days began to go with wearing deliberation, as all days go that are counted impatiently. His sorrow and his wrongs were his only companions; as his anxiety for his liberty and Agrippa's success increased, his healthy indifference to his unwholesome atmosphere began to decline rapidly, his resentment against his oppression to grow. The six weeks ebbed out and passed. His anxiety flowed into his bitterness and his bitterness into his anxiety until they were one. Troubled about his liberty, he clenched his teeth and thought on Saul; thinking of his impotent position against the powerful Pharisee, he watched the harbor from the counting-room and trembled whenever a sail crossed it.