Jerked from her balance, she screamed and threw out her hands to keep from falling upon the shoulders of her assailant. One or two others with unintelligible sounds struggled up, and as she fell, the Maccabee leaped from the darkness, wrenched her from the grasp of her captor, and warding off attack with his knife, fled with her into the darkness. The transfer of control over her had been made so swiftly that in her stupor of terror she hardly realized it. She was struggling silently and strongly in his hold, when he clasped her to him with a firmer impulsive embrace and whispered to her: "Comfort thee, dear heart! It is I, Hesper!" She ceased to resist so suddenly and was so tensely still that he knew the shock of immense reaction was having its way with her. He knew without asking that she had been forced to leave the shelter of the Greek's roof, and though his rage threatened to rise up and blind him he was not entirely unaware of the benefit the inhospitality of others had given him. At last she was with him; entirely in his care. It was a safe shelter into which she was brought, but no luxurious one. There was light enough from the single torch stuck in a crevice in the ancient rock to show that it was habitable. The immense floor was packed hard by the trampling of many feet; overhead, lost in gloom, there must have been a rocky roof, but it was invisible. On the ledges of rocks were belongings by heaps and collections, showing that this was an abiding-place for great numbers. In the far shadows she distinguished long, silent, mummied windrows of men wrapped in blankets, sleeping. Huge gloomy piles of provisions filled up shadowy corners; about under the light was the litter left in the wake of human counsel; over all was the air of repose and occupancy that made a home out of the burrow. Though the place held a great number of refugees, the footstep of the Maccabee wakened resounding emptiness. At the threshold he slackened his step and looked with pathetic anxiety at whatever light on Laodice's face would show her opinion of her refuge. But the uncertain torch revealed nothing and he led her in and across to a solitary place where rugs from some looted house had been folded up for a pallet and spread about for carpets. She sat down and awaited his speech. He motioned to the spacious barrenness about him. "Canst thou content thyself in this place?" he asked, hesitating. She nodded, but feeling that her reply had not shown all that words might, she lifted her face that he might see therein that which she could not trust her lips to say. It was her undoing. Her weakness overwhelmed her and burying her face in the folds of her mantle, she wept. After a dismayed silence, he bent over her and said with a quiver of distress in his voice: "I--I have work, here, to do, but I shall take thee out of the city for better refuge--"