kept
a place in his heart for Captain Homecht's pretty daughter.

She had never met him without gladdening him by a greeting which he
always returned with kind words, such as: "The Lord bless you, child!"
or: "It is a delightful hour when an old man meets so fair a creature."
Many years before--she had then worn the curls of childhood--he had even
sent her a lamb, whose snowy fleece was specially silky, after having
bartered the corn from her father's lands for cattle of his most famous
breed--and what his son had told him of Kasana had been well fitted to
increase his regard for her.

He beheld in the archer's daughter the most charming young girl in Tanis
and, had she been the child of Hebrew parents, he would have rejoiced to
wed her to his son.

To find his darling in such a state caused the old man grief so profound
that bright tears ran down upon his snowy beard and his voice trembled
as, while greeting her, he saw the blood-stained bandage on her shoulder.

After she had been laid on his couch, and Nun had placed his own chest of
medicines at the disposal of the skilful prophetess, Miriam asked the men
to leave her alone with the suffering Egyptian, and when she again called
them into the tent she had revived the strength of the severely-wounded
girl with cordials, and bandaged the hurt more carefully than had been
possible before.

Kasana, cleansed from the blood-stains and with her hair neatly arranged,
lay beneath the fresh linen coverings like a sleeping child just on the
verge of maidenhood.

She was still breathing, but the color had not returned to cheeks or
lips, and she did not open her eyes until she had drunk the cordial
Miriam mixed for her a second time.

The old man and his grandson stood at the foot of her couch, and each
would fain have asked the other why he could not restrain his tears
whenever he looked at this stranger's face.

The certainty that Kasana was wicked and faithless, which had so
unexpectedly forced itself upon Ephraim, had suddenly turned his heart
from her and startled him back into the right path which he had
abandoned. Yet what he had heard in her tent had remained a profound
secret, and as he told his grandfather and Miriam that she had
compassionately interceded for the prisoners, and both had desired to
hear more of her, he had felt like a father who had witnessed the crime
of a beloved son, and no word of the abominable things he had heard had
escaped his lips.