his arrival
in the camp of the Hebrews, had much to tell that was to them entirely
new.

Judas with thrilling interest had listened to the muleteer's account of
Zarah's peril and escape from the palace of Antiochus, and the deaths
of Hadassah and Pollux. The fount of tenderness which lay concealed
under the chief's usually calm and almost stern exterior was stirred to
its inmost depths. Grief, admiration, love, swelled his brave heart.
Maccabeus could hardly wait to hear the end of Joab's narration. Zarah
was near him--his beauteous, his beloved, his chosen bride--she who had
so suffered and so mourned--the tender orphan maiden bereaved of all
love, all protection save his own--but dearer in her poverty and
desolation than she could have been had she brought him the dowry of an
empire!

It was thus that Maccabeus thought of Zarah, as, with an eagerness of
impatience which could not have brooked an instant's longer delay, he
strode rapidly towards the hut which sheltered his treasure. He soon
beheld her--could it indeed be she? No desolate, weeping, trembling
fugitive met the gaze of the chief; but a maiden bright and fair as the
morn, with a blush on her cheeks and a smile on her lips, her whole
countenance beaming with hope, and her eyes fixed with a lingering look
on a Greek who was disappearing from view in a direction opposite to
that by which Judas had approached her! The depths of the leader's
feelings were again stirred, but this time as by a bar of glowing
red-hot iron.

"Who is yon Gentile?" was the sudden fierce exclamation which burst
from the warrior's lips.

Never before had her kinsman looked so terrible to Zarah as when he
startled her then by his sudden appearance. It was not because she now
saw Maccabeus for the first time arrayed in the harness of battle, his
tall powerful frame partly sheathed in glittering steel, and a plumed
helmet on his head, giving him a resemblance to the description which
she had heard from Lycidas of the fabled god of war; it was the eye,
the manner, the tone of Judas that changed the smile of the maiden in a
moment to a look of embarrassment and fear. Antiochus himself, on his
judgment-seat, had scarcely appeared more formidable to the trembling
captive before him, than did the kinsman who had come to welcome her,
and who would have died to shield her from wrong!

Maccabeus repeated his stern question before Zarah found courage to
reply. "That is Lycidas, the