orld. Even the
most intolerant pagan is curious about Jerusalem."

She looked again at his face. It was not Greek or Roman, neither more
indicative of her own blood.

"Are you a Jew?" she asked.

He remembered that she had seen him in a synagogue.

"I was," he said after a silence.

She looked at him a moment before she made comment.

"I never heard a Jew say it that way before."

He acknowledged the rebuke with the flash of a smile that appeared
only in his eyes.

"A Jew entirely Jewish wears the mark on him. You have had to ask if I
were a Jew. Would I be consistent to claim to be that which in no wise
shows to be in me?"

"It is time to be a Jew or against the Jews," she said gravely. "There
is no middle ground concerning Judea at this hour."

Serious words from the lips of a woman in whom a man expects to find
entertainment are obtrusive, a paradox. Still the new generosity in
his heart for this girl made any manner she chose, engaging, so that
it showed him the sight of her face and gave him the sound of her
voice.

"Seeing," he said, "that it is the hour of the Jewish hope, is it
politic for us to declare ourselves for its benefits?"

"The call at this hour," she exclaimed reproachfully, "is to be great
in sacrifice--not for reward. It is the word of the prophets that we
shall not attain glory until we have suffered for it. We have not yet
made the beginning."

She touched so familiarly on his own thoughts which had haunted him
since ambition had awakened in him in his boyhood, that his interest
in his own hope surged to the fore.

"How goes it in Jerusalem?" he asked earnestly.

"Evilly, they say," she answered, "but I have not been in the city.
Yet you see Judea. That which has destroyed it threatens the city.
Jews have no friends abroad over the world. We need then our own, our
own!"

"Trust me, lady, for a good Jew. I have said that I had been one,
because I admit how far I have drifted from my people. But I am going
back!"

Somehow that strong avowal touched the deep springs of her grief. She
knew the pleasure that her father would have felt in it. With the
greatness of his sacrifice in mind, she filled with the determination
that his work should not have been in vain.

She rose and flung back the cumbrous striped mantle on her shoulders
and put out her hands to the Maccabee.

"Hast seen these pilgrims going to the Passover?" she exclaimed, with
color rising as her emotion grew. "Al