Or if they did not, Caleb would, Caleb whose bitter jealousy, as her instinct told her, had turned his love to hate.

Never would he let her live to fall, perchance, as his share of the Temple spoil, into the hands of the Roman rival who had escaped him.
It was not too great a price.

Because of the birth doom laid upon her, even if he sought it, and fortune brought them back together again, she could never be a wife to Marcus.

And for the rest she was weary, sick with the sight and sound of slaughter and with the misery that in these latter days, as her Lord had prophesied, was come upon the city that rejected him and the people who had slain Him, their Messiah.

Miriam wished to die, to pass to that home of perfect and eternal peace in which she believed; where, mayhap, it might be given to her in reward of her sufferings, to watch from afar over the soul of Marcus, and to make ready an abode for it to dwell in through all the ages of infinity.