ng.

He had waved his hand to her while still afar, but he came alone,
without Hosea or Joshua, she cared not what the rescued man called
himself; and it angered her to feel that this hurt her, nay, pierced
her to the heart. Yet she esteemed her elderly husband and it was not
difficult for her to give him a cordial welcome.

He answered her greeting joyously and tenderly; but when she pointed to
the re-united pair and extolled him as victor and deliverer of Reuben
and so many hapless men, he frankly owned that he had no right to this
praise, it was the due of "Joshua," whom she herself had summoned in the
name of the Most High to command the warriors of the people.

Miriam turned pale and, in spite of the steepness of the road, pressed
her husband with questions. When she heard that Joshua was resting on
the heights with his father and the young men and refreshing themselves
with wine, and that Hur had promised to resign voluntarily, if Moses
desired to entrust the command to him, her heavy eye-brows contracted in
a gloomy frown beneath her broad forehead and, with curt severity, she
exclaimed:

"You are my lord, and it is not seemly for me to oppose you, not even if
you forget your own wife so far that you give place to the man who once
ventured to raise his eyes to her."

"He no longer cares for you," Hur eagerly interrupted; "nay, were I to
give you a letter of divorce, he would no longer desire to possess you."

"Would he not?" asked Miriam with a forced smile. "Do you owe this
information to him?"

"He has devoted himself, body and soul, to the welfare of the people and
renounces the love of woman," replied Hur. But his wife exclaimed:

"Renunciation is easy, where desire would bring nothing save fresh
rejection and shame. Not to him who, in the hour of the utmost peril,
sought aid from the Egyptians is the honor of the chief command of the
warriors due, but rather to you, who led the tribes to the first victory
at the store-house in Succoth and to whom the Lord Himself, through
Moses His servant, confided the command."

Hur looked anxiously at the woman for whom a late, fervent love had
fired his heart, and seeing her glowing cheeks and hurried breathing,
knew not whether to attribute these symptoms to the steep ascent or to
the passionate ambition of her aspiring soul, which she now transferred
to him, her husband.

That she held him in so much higher esteem than the younger hero, whose
return he had