And so for year after year, though he lingered in the city that held his dear ones, he abode in his cold marble-pillared house, save for his Moorish servant, having speech with man nor woman. Nor did he ever emerge, unless at hours when his childish persecutors were abed, so that in time they turned to fresher sport. But at night he would sometimes be met wandering by the dark canals, with eyes that kept the inward look of the sequestered student, seeming to see nothing of the sombre many-twinkling beauty of starlit waters, or the tender coloring of mist and haze, but full only of the melancholy of the gray marshes, and sometimes growing wet with bitter yearning for the sun and the orange-trees and the warmth of friendly faces. And sometimes in the cold dawn the early market-people met him riding madly in the environs, in the silk doublet of a Portuguese grandee, his sword clanking, and in his hand a silver-mounted pistol, with which he snapped off the twigs as he flew past. And when his beloved brother was married to the daughter of Manasseh, the millionaire and the president of the India Company--which in that wonderful year paid its shareholders a dividend of seventy-five in the hundred--some of the wedding-guests averred that they had caught a glimpse of Uriel's dark, yearning face amid the motley crowd assembled outside the synagogue to watch the arrival of Joseph Acosta and his beautiful bride; and there were those who said that Uriel's hands were raised as in blessing. And once on a moonless midnight, when the venerable Dona Acosta had passed away, the watchman in the Jews' cemetery, stealing from his turret at a suspicious noise, turned his lantern upon--no body-snatcher, but--O more nefarious spectacle!--the sobbing figure of Uriel Acosta across a new-dug grave, polluting the holy soil of the _Beth-Chayim_! IX And so the seasons and the years wore on, each walling in the lonely thinker with more solid ice, and making it only the more difficult ever to break through or to melt his prison walls. Nigh fifteen long winter years had passed in a solitude tempered by theological thought, and Uriel, nigh forgotten by his people, had now worked his way even from the religion of Moses. It was the heart alone that was the seat of religion; wherefore, no self-styled Revelation that contradicted Nature could be true. Right Religion was according to Right Reason; but no religion was reasonable that could set brother against brother. All ceremonies were opposed to Reason. Goodness was the only true religion. Such bold conclusions sometimes affrighted himself, being alone in the world to hold them. "All evils," his note-book summed it up in his terse Latin, "come from not following Right Reason and the Law of Nature."