As Costobarus turned from his window to pace up and down his chamber,
Hannah's argument came back to him with new energy. He felt with a
kind of panic that his confident answer to her might have been wrong.
When a girl appeared in the archway, he moved impulsively toward her,
as if to retract the command that would send her out into this land
that the Lord had spoken against, but the strength and repose in her
face communicated itself to him.
Above all other suggestions in her presence was that overpowering
richness of oriental beauty which no other kind in the world may
surpass in its appeal to the loves of men. Enough of the Roman stock
in her line had given structural firmness and stature to a type which
at her age would have developed weight and duskiness, but she was
taller and more slender than the women of her race, and supple and
alive and splendid. About her hips was knotted a silken scarf of red
and white and green with long undulant fringes that added to the lithe
grace in her movements. Under it was a glistening garment of silver
tissue that reached to the small ankles laced about by the ribbons of
white sandals. For sleeves there were netted fringes through which the
fine luster of her arms was visible. About her wrists, her throat and
in her hair, heavy and shining black, were golden coins that marked
her steps with stealthy tinkling.
Costobarus, in spite of the shock of doubt and fear in his brain,
looked at her as if with the happy eyes of the astonished Maccabee. In
those full tender lips, in the slope of those black, silken brows, in
the sparkling behind the dusky slumbrous eyes, there was all the fire
and generosity and limitless charm that should make her lover's world
a place of delight and perfume and music.
"How is it with you, Laodice?" he asked, faltering a little.
"I am prepared, my father," she answered.
"I commend your despatch. I would be gone within an hour."
She bowed and Costobarus regarded her with growing wistfulness. At
this last moment his love was to become his obstacle, his fear for his
child his one cowardice.
"Dost thou remember him?" he asked without preliminary.
Laodice answered as if the thought were first in her mind.
"Not at all; and yet, if I could remember him, I may not discover in
the man of four-and-twenty anything of the lad of ten."
"He may not have changed. There are such natures, and, as I recall
him, his may well be one of these. His disposition from childhood to
boyhood did not change. When I knew him in Jerusalem, he was worthy
the notice of a man. The manner he had there he bore with him to this,
a smaller city, and hence to Ephesus, a city of another kind. It was
good to see him examine the world, reject this and that and look upon
his choice proudly. He made the schools observe him, consider him. He
did not enter them for alteration, nor was he shut up in a shell of
self-satisfaction. He entered them as a citizen of the world and as an
examiner of all philosophy. Yet the world taught him nothing. It gave
him merely the open school where regulation and atmosphere helped him
to teach himself. O wife of a child, thou shalt not be ashamed of thy
husband, man-grown!"