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