catch thee as I shall, since there is no other fool in Judea who will
undertake to feed thee, I shall leave the print of my displeasure on
thee from thy head to thy heel! Mark me!"

The woman laughed aloud, with such peculiar insolence and amusement
that one of the servants heard her and turned his head that way.

"Pah! What a timid villain thou art," the woman said, when the servant
looked away again. "How much better it would have been had Julian
fixed upon _me_ as his confederate!"

"Not for Julian! You plot against him even now. But say what you will,
you go to Emmaus to-night, without fail. I have spoken!"

Aquila touched his horse and riding away from the woman came up beside
Costobarus who was gazing over the country through which they were
passing.

It was a great plain, advancing by benches and slopes to the edge of a
rocky shore. Without forests, spotted only with verdure, vast, barren,
exhausted with the constant production of fourteen centuries, it was a
cheerless sea-front at its best. To the west the wash of the tideless
Mediterranean tumbled along an unindented coast; to the east the
sallow stony earth went up and up, toward an ever receding sallow
horizon. Between lay humbled towns, wholly abandoned to the bats and
to the ignoble wild life of the Judean wilderness. There were no sheep
or cattle. Vespasian had passed that way and required the flocks of
the nation for the subsistence of his four legions. There were no
olive or fig groves. They had been the first to fall under the Roman
ax, for the policy of Roman warfare was that the first step in