The City of Delight

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!"