A sure instinct warned him that the opportunity for murder was too perfect to have come by chance; and here now were the myrmidons, and their business was with him.

He turned an anxious eye upon the Northman's comrade--young, black-eyed, black-haired, and altogether Jewish in appearance; he observed, also, that both the men were in costume exactly such as professionals of their class were in the habit of wearing in the arena.

Putting the several circumstances together, Ben-Hur could not be longer in doubt: he had been lured into the palace with design.

Out of reach of aid, in this splendid privacy, he was to die! At a loss what to do, he gazed from man to man, while there was enacted within him that miracle of mind by which life is passed before us in awful detail, to be looked at by ourselves as if it were another's; and from the evolvement, from a hidden depth, cast up, as it were, by a hidden hand, he was given to see that he had entered upon a new life, different from the old one in this: whereas, in that, he had been the victim of violences done to him, henceforth he was to be the aggressor.

Only yesterday he had found his first victim! To the purely Christian nature the presentation would have brought the weakness of remorse.