Ben-Hur blushed, clasped his hands, stammered, and turned away at loss.
Simonides pressed him.
"The proofs, the proofs, I say! Set them before me--lay them in my hands!" Yet Ben-Hur had no answer.

He had not anticipated the requirement; and, now that it was made, to him as never before came the awful fact that the three years in the galley had carried away all the proofs of his identity; mother and sister gone, he did not live in the knowledge of any human being.

Many there were acquainted with him, but that was all.

Had Quintus Arrius been present, what could he have said more than where he found him, and that he believed the pretender to be the son of Hur?
But, as will presently appear in full, the brave Roman sailor was dead.

Judah had felt the loneliness before; to the core of life the sense struck him now.