Inactivity became eventually unbearable, for an unemployed moment was a miserable moment. He could not devise a way to liberty, nor further aid his one ally into power, so he turned to his own resources against Saul. Continuing cautiously to visit the proseuchae by night, he learned something, which he heard casually at the time, but which eventually developed into a matter of importance. He heard that the Nazarenes were flying from Jerusalem in great numbers, scattering in bodies from Damascus to Alexandria, and from Jerusalem to Rome. The rabbis of Ptolemais were concerned to discover that there was a community hiding in the city, because they feared the evils of a persecution, established in Ptolemais, as much as the influence of the apostasy upon the faithful. When Marsyas admitted casually to himself, after he had heard the tidings, that the apostasy must have numbers of followers, he was carried in his thinking to the realization that numbers meant strength and strength meant resistance. Why, then, should not these people turn on the Pharisee? Here, in a twinkling, he believed that he had discovered abettors, allies whom he could instantly enlist in his own cause. But before he could deduce resolution from this electrifying admission, events began to mark his days. Late one afternoon, after the time for his ransoming was out, a man approached the opening in the grating. The shadows in the badly-lighted chamber made client and steward and all the appointments in the dingy counting-room imperfect shapes to the eye. The new-comer leaned down to the opening and peered at Marsyas as he pushed a fibula of gold through the opening. "I am in need," the man said. "Canst thou not give me the value of this in money?" The voice was resonant and strangely familiar to Marsyas. In the gloom the great lifted shoulders of the man, bending from his height, brought back on a sudden the chamber in the college at Jerusalem. The young Essene came closer to the grating and looked at the applicant. There was a mutual start of recognition; in Marsyas perhaps the chill that a fugitive feels who finds himself detected. The man was the Rabbi Eleazar. "Thou! Here, with them?" the rabbi exclaimed in a suppressed whisper. "I am here, Rabbi," Marsyas replied, "but alone." Eleazar looked at him, but the examination under the difficulty of the gloom was not satisfactory; besides, there was the stir of others who had come in behind him and were able to listen. Marsyas swept the fibula into one of the coin-baskets and passed a handful of silver to the rabbi. "Meet me without at the end of the first watch to-night," the rabbi added, as he thanked Marsyas. "Do not fear me, for I am also a victim of thine enemy."