She saw, before her, Nathan, the Christian, who had buried her father, who had blessed her, who would know and could testify to a surety that she was the wife of Philadelphus! She slipped by him without a sound and hurried down into the darkest corner of the cavern.
Circumstance had found her in her refuge and would drive her away from this sweet home back to that hateful house, to the man she did not love! For many days, with increasing distress, Laodice avoided Nathan, the Christian.

With that fascinated terror which at times forces human creatures to examine a peril, she felt irresistibly impelled to try his memory of events, that she might know if indeed he would recognize her.
Though she turned cold and flashed white when he came upon her one day in the darkness of their shelter, she felt nevertheless the relief of approaching a solution to her perplexity.
"They tell me," he said with the deliberate speech of the old, "that Titus is once more permitting citizens to depart from Jerusalem unharmed." "Then," she said, grasping at this hope, "why do you stay here in this peril ?" "Why should I leave it?
Even with the singers who wept by the waters of Babylon, I prefer Jerusalem above my chief joy.

Except for the time when we of the Way were warned to depart, I have been in Jerusalem all my life.

Then, though I had gone as far as Caesarea on my way to Antioch to join the brethren there, homesickness overtook me and I turned in my tracks, saying no man farewell, and came back." "A weary journey for one so old," she said gently.
Would he remember also that it had been dangerous?
"Nay, but a journey full of works and reward.

And I discovered at the end of it that I had lived in error forty years; that Christ never ceases to prove Himself." Already the forbidden tenets of the Nazarene faith had entered into his words.