thy master, the joy of thine own declining days. Shield her against
wrong and misfortune by all the strength that in thee lies, as thou
hopest in the King to come and the reward of the steadfast. Promise!"

They were silent lips that once knew the art and the sound of speech.
The old habit never entirely fell away from them. Under this anguish
they moved--fruitlessly; over the deformed face flitted the keen
agony of regret; then he lifted his great left arm and bent it upward
at the elbow; the huge, even monstrous muscles, knotted and kinked
from shoulder to elbow, sank down under the broad barbarian bracelet
of bronze and rippled under and rose again from elbow to wrist,
ferocious, superhuman! In that movement the dying man read the mute's
consecration of his one great strength to the protection of the
tenderly loved Laodice. Costobarus motioned to the shittim-wood casket
and Momus undid it and strapped it on his own belt.

"The frosts! The frosts!" the dying man whispered. The mute
understood. Then the father's eyes wandered toward the figure of his
daughter fended away from him by the pagan. The agony of her suffering
and the agony of his distress for her bridged the space between them.
And while they yearned toward each other in a silence that quivered
with pain, the light darkened in Costobarus' eyes.

When Laodice came to herself, she was laid upon a spot of rough grass,
in the shelter of an overhanging bluff. It was not the scene upon
which her sorrow-stunned eyes had closed a while before. The village
was nowhere in sight; the plain had been left behind; any further view
was shut off by Aquila's horse, and the two camels whose bridles were
in the hands of Hiram. Beside the stricken girl knelt Momus and
Aquila; standing at her feet was a new-comer, on whom her wandering and