ust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide; keep the
doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom_." Micah vii. 5.
_And endorsing this, Jesus said: "They shall deliver you up to be
afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all, for my
name's sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one
another, and, shall hate one another_." Matt. xxiv.

With father, mother, brother, lover, sister, friend all acting as
betrayers of their own kith and kin, Apleon soon learned much that he
needed to know as to the fugitives. He discovered that the many
thousand fleeing Jews had, first, at least, travelled southwards, and
he instructed his emissaries to ascertain the objective point of these
fleeing Jews. He left the whole thing in the hands of his chaplain,
"The False Prophet," who had the essence of all the subtlety of Hell in
his composition, with all the devilish ingeniousness of cruelty of
every Inquisitor who had ever practised in past days. A "lamb" in
seeming, he was a "dragon in actual nature." Rev. xiii. 11.

Spies had informed him that Cohen, the first high-priest, was
undoubtedly the leader of the fugitives, but that his wife and daughter
had refused to accompany him. "They are wholly with our World-Lord,
Apleon," one of the spies had said.

"Will Cohen, think you," asked the chaplain, "steal back under cover of
one of the dark nights and try to induce his wife to join him?"

"No," laughed the spy. "He will think himself well rid of her. She
has been the plague of his life. Every drop of her blood is as sharp
as the juice of a lime. Her lips distil wormwood. And vinegar is a
cloying sweetness compared to her kindest thought or utterance, and----"

"But the daughter," interrupted the chaplain, sharply, "What of her?
Is she a replica of her mother?"

"Not a bit, not a bit of it!" And the eyes of the betrayer flashed
with a new light. "Miriam is as beautiful as a houri, as fair as the
light of a sun-lit day after a black night of tempest, and as sweet in
disposition as Rachel, the favoured of our father Jacob."

"If she is all this, why is she unwed? or perhaps she loves, and
perhaps we could make her a tool of her lover, and thus find out where
her father has led those dogs of fugitives."

There was a look of hate and malice in the eyes of the betrayer, as he
answered: "Yes, she loves, loves as her very life, but the man she
loves is an even greater zealot t