ack against the wall to let them pass,
stretched out his hand to the weeping Esther; but she passed him,
crying and hurrying after her lover. Down in the passage the large
door stood wide, showing the waiting carriage in the dim starlight
of the sultry night. As they pushed him to the door, he suddenly
wrested himself free for an instant, and Esther rushed into his
arms.

"Oh, Nicholas, Nicholas! Good-bye!"

The priests seized her by the shoulder, wrenching her away, and one
hurled her with a fury of loathing back into the darkness of the
passage. Then they forced their prisoner forward, stumbling,
resisting, to the carriage. The door snapped to, the horses plunged
forward, and the carriage thundered away into the night. Esther
picked herself up from where she had fallen in the passage, and
bruised and trembling, but with a joyous smile, rushed up the
narrow stairway.

"Solomon!" she said, whispering in the old Jew's ear, "Hiram has
gone in the place of Nicholas! Nicholas is safe here. Oh, help us
to get to the sea!"

Solomon shook with laughter as he heard--for a Jew loves dearly a
clever ruse--and he stroked Esther's soft hair as she stood by him.

"Light us a lamp, and let us get away to the shore, that we can
embark and be away on the water at dawn, before they discover it
and return," Then she passed by him and entered the room where
Nicholas awaited her. Solomon trimmed a lamp and a lantern for
them, and put up some bread and meat for their journey, his
shoulders shaking with inward chuckles as he did so.

"Hiram a priest!" he repeated to himself; "that is a joke indeed,
and Esther, what a quick brain she has--a true daughter of Israel!"
and Esther was murmuring within to Nicholas:

"Jehovah has saved us. Now let us hasten down to the sea."

The next morning, when the dawn broke soft and rosy over the fair
plain of Jericho, the sea that is called the Dead Sea, yet seems,
in its glorious wealth of colour and sparkling brilliance to be
rather the emblem of Life, glowed and flashed like a huge sapphire
in the sun's rays, and at its calm edge, that meets the shore
without a ripple, swayed gently the ship of the pilgrims from the
Jewish Colony.

Nicholas and Esther sat side by side watching the pilgrims' oars
dip quietly in perfect rhythm as they sang. And the song of praise
went up through the golden air, and echoed back to the sunny,
silent strand vanishing behind them.

V

Dawn was breaking