merchant of Palmyra, according to a custom of the time, took the
name of his royal patron as that of his own "fahdh," or family,
and the father of young Odhainat in the portico, as was Odhainat
himself, was known as Septimus Odaenathus, while the young girl
found her Arabic name of Bath Zabbai, Latinized into that of
Septima Zenobia.

But as, thinking nothing of all this, they looked lazily on the
throng below, a sudden exclamation from the lad caused his
companion to raise her flashing black eyes inquiringly to his
face.

"What troubles you, my Odhainat?" she asked.

"There, there; look there, Bath Zabbai!" replied the boy
excitedly; "coming through the Damascus arch, and we thought him
to be in Emesa."

The girl's glance followed his guiding finger, but even as she
looked a clear trumpet peal rose above the din of the city, while
from beneath a sculptured archway that spanned a colonnaded
cross-street the bright April sun gleamed down upon the standard
of Rome with its eagle crest and its S. P. Q. R. design beneath.
There is a second trumpet peal, and swinging into the great
Street of the Thousand Columns, at the head of his light-armed
legionaries, rides the centurion Rufinus, lately advanced to the
rank of tribune of one of the chief Roman cohorts in Syria. His
coming, as Odhainat and even the young Bath Zabbai knew, meant a
stricter supervision of the city, a re-enforcement of its
garrison, and the assertion of the mastership of Rome over this