He shut the window.
Noon was high over Ascalon and Pestilence was Caesar within its walls.
It was the penalty of warfare, the long black shadow that the passage of a great army casts upon a battling nation.

Physicians could not give it a name.

It seized upon healthy victims, rent them, blasted them and cast them dead and distorted in their tracks, before help could reach them.

It passed like fire on a high wind through whole countries and left behind it silence and feeding vultures.
As Costobarus turned from his window to pace up and down his chamber, Hannah's argument came back to him with new energy.

He felt with a kind of panic that his confident answer to her might have been wrong.
When a girl appeared in the archway, he moved impulsively toward her, as if to retract the command that would send her out into this land that the Lord had spoken against, but the strength and repose in her face communicated itself to him.
Above all other suggestions in her presence was that overpowering richness of oriental beauty which no other kind in the world may surpass in its appeal to the loves of men.