The City of Delight

"It is sweet to have you concerned for me. Now you may understand how

much I am troubled for your own welfare. Do not regard me with that

unbending gaze. I am, first and before all else, your friend."

"You have changed," she said slowly. "I did not find in you this

solicitude in the hills."

"Unhappiness," he sighed, "makes most men law-less. I should be even

now as bad, were I not sure of the sympathy you feel for me."

She looked at him with large disdain.

"Does not this woman treat you well?" she asked with the first glimmer

of sarcasm in her eyes.

"Her displeasure in me is that I do not make her a queen; yours,

however, that I can not save this doomed nation! Her ambitions are for

herself; yours are for me. Which waketh the response in my heart,

lady?"

"What have I lived for?" she burst out. "For what was I brought up and

schooled? For what have I sacrificed all the light and desirable

things of my youth, but for--"

"Nay! Do not show me, yet, that you are only bent on being queen!" he

exclaimed.

"I care for nothing but the rescue of Judea!" she cried passionately.

"There is nothing left to me but that!"

"Then your ambitions are still for me. Alas, that the Messiah has come

and gone!"

It was his first reference to the great calamity he had told to her a

short time before. Its recurrence after she had resolved to regard it

as an impossible and blasphemous tale brought a chill to her heart.

"If I can prove to you that there is no hope for Jerusalem, what

then?" he asked suddenly.

She flung off the question with a gesture.

"Answer me. What then?"

"It is unimaginable what shall come to pass when God deserts His own."

"No need for imaginings. Look at Jerusalem and observe the fact. And

if we be abandoned, what fealty do we owe to a God that deserts us? If

you believe or not you are lost. Let us go out and live."

"If God has deserted us," she said scornfully, "how shall we be

happier elsewhere than here?"

"Every god to its own country. The Olympians are a jovial lot. I have

seen Joy's very self in heathendom."

She moved away but he rose and followed her.

"Whoever you are," he said in another tone, "your heritage of

innocence and earnestness is plain as an open scroll upon your face.

Nothing in all the world so appeals to the generosity in the heart of

a man as the purity of the woman who is pure. I have said that I am

your friend. I do not hold it against you that you doubt that word.

Nothing remains but the deed to confirm it. This place is lost--as

good as a heap of ashes and splintered rock, this hour! Come away!

I'll sacrifice the treasure to protect you!"