tribe of
Ephraim, nay the whole Hebrew nation had hailed these tidings with the
utmost joy. Eliab would give him fuller details; she herself had been
well nigh dazed with weeping and anxiety. He would earn the richest
blessings if he would only follow her.

The soldier realized at once that he must fulfil this desire, but he was
obliged to defer his visit to the old slave until the nest morning. The
messenger, however, even in her haste, had told him many incidents she
had seen herself or heard from others.

At last she left him. He rekindled the fire and, so long as the flames
burned brightly, his gaze was bent with a gloomy, thoughtful expression
upon the west. Not till they had devoured the fuel and merely flickered
with a faint bluish light around the charred embers did he fix his eyes
on the whirling sparks. And the longer he did so, the deeper, the more
unconquerable became the conflict in his soul, whose every energy, but
yesterday, had been bent upon a single glorious goal.

The war against the Libyan rebels had detained him eighteen months from
his home, and he had seen ten crescent moons grow full since any news
had reached him of his kindred. A few weeks before he had been ordered
to return, and when to-day he approached nearer and nearer to the
obelisks towering above Tanis, the city of Rameses, his heart had pulsed
with as much joy and hopefulness as if the man of thirty were once more
a boy.

Within a few short hours he should again see his beloved, noble father,
who had needed great deliberation and much persuasion from Hosea's
mother--long since dead--ere he would permit his son to follow the bent
of his inclinations and enter upon a military life in Pharaoh's army. He
had anticipated that very day surprising him with the news that he had
been promoted above men many years his seniors and of Egyptian lineage.
Instead of the slights Nun had dreaded, Hosea's gallant bearing, courage
and, as he modestly added, good-fortune had gained him promotion, yet
he had remained a Hebrew. When he felt the necessity of offering to some
god sacrifices and prayer, he had bowed before Seth, to whose temple
Nun had led him when a child, and whom in those days all the people in
Goshen in whose veins flowed Semitic blood had worshipped. But he also
owed allegiance to another god, not the God of his fathers, but the
deity revered by all the Egyptians who had been initiated. He remained
unknown to the masses, who could no