hat I--" Laodice began and stopped, bewildered.

Amaryllis, smiling, moved toward the inner corridor of her house. At
the threshold of the arch she called back:

"Please yourself, my friend," and was gone.

Laodice was, by this time, stunned and intensely repelled. The hand on
which Amaryllis had laid hers in passing tingled under the touch.
Unconsciously she shook off the sensation of contact. The whole clear
white interior of the hall became instantly unclean. Her standards of
right and wrong were shaken; the wholesale assaults on her ideals left
her shocked and unconfident. She felt the panic that all innocent
women feel when suddenly aroused to the unfitness of their
surroundings.

When she turned to hurry to her room, a flood of scarlet rushed into
her cheeks and she shrank back, shaken with surprise and delight.

Before her stood a man, pale and thin, with his eyes upon her.

Chapter XII

THE PRINCE RETURNS

Joseph, the shepherd, son of Thomas of Pella, moved out of the green
marsh before sunset, as he had planned to do, but not for the original
motive. The sheep, indeed, would not have flourished in that dampness,
rich as it was in young grass, but, more than that, there was no
shelter for the wounded man who lay by the roadside.

The shepherd, who knew the hills of Judea as far as the Plain of
Esdraelon as well as he knew the stony streets of the Christian city,
located the nearest roof as one which a fagot-maker had occupied two
years before. It was some distance up in the hills to the west. Since
the scourge of war had passed over Palestine, there were scores of
such hovels, vacant and abandoned to the bats and the small wild life
about the countryside, and the boy doubted seriously if the thatch
that covered it were still whole. But he attracted the attention of a
pair of robust young Galileans on the way to the Passover, and, by
their help, carried the wounded man to shelter in this hut. Urge, the
sheep-dog, rushed the sheep out of the sedge and hurried them after
his master, and in an hour Joseph was once more settled, his sheep
were once more nosing over the rocky slants of a hill, his dog once
more flat on his belly, watching. But it was a different day, after
all.

The hut of the fagot-maker was the four walls and a roof and the earth
that floored it, but it was wealth because it was shelter. It had two
doors which were merely openings in the sides and between them lay the
man on she